Abstract
In this chapter on Turandot as a “Chinese Box” investigates the yellowface opera, a Chinese box of beauty and bestiality, a controversial Pandora’s box. This Chinese box is thus made in Italy, set in “Peking,” and distributed worldwide. This argument moves from Puccini’s Orientalism to the 1987 Franco Zeffirelli production at the Metropolitan Opera. It concludes with two fifth-generation auteurs, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, both having handled with extreme aesthetic care their Italian inheritance, if also with extreme conceptual carelessness.
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Ma, Sm. (2017). Turandot: The Chinese Box by Puccini, Zeffirelli, Zhang, and Chen. In: Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58033-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58033-3_4
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58032-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58033-3
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