Tsodokov, E. S. The Forth Riddle of Turandot

Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of a very important problem, the so-called ‘open form’ which is expressed in incomplete works written by authors of the past and modern age including post-modernism when the open form became the main principle of text creation. The other problem is the relation between different layers of the literary basis of a music piece. Based on the example of the opera (Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ in our case), the author of the present article shows that in the operatic work as a new creation that has emergent properties, it is impossible to separate the initial literary text which could have been viewed independently from the final result – music scores without the loss of the integrity of the operatic work. In his research the author has used the semantic analysis of literary texts, in particular, librettos; comparative analysis of various literary works and artworks that constitute the discursive basis of the opera under discussion and the critical – analytical analysis of sources. The research has an interdisciplinary nature and applies the art historical, literary and musicological approaches that view the operatic work as the part of the cultural environment. By studying Pucchini’s opera ‘Turandot’, the researcher distinguishes between an indeliberately unfinished work and a work created according to the non finito principle when a composition is deliberately incomplete. The researcher shows that the above mentioned technique had the esthetic grounds created in the middle of the 20th century and was used mostly in avantgardism and post-modernism.

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