Turandot Turandot Turandot (; ; ) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, completed by Franco Alfano, and set to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. Though Puccini's first interest in the subject was based on his reading of Friedrich Schiller's 1801 adaptation of the play, his work is most nearly based on the earlier text "Turandot" (1762) by Count Carlo Gozzi. The original story is based on one of the seven stories in the epic "Haft Peykar" ("The Seven Beauties"), a work of 12th-century Persian poet Nizami. Nizami aligned the seven stories with the
Giacomo Puccini critics as to the artistic value of his work has always been divided. Grove Music Online described Puccini's strengths as a composer as follows: Puccini succeeded in mastering the orchestra as no other Italian had done before him, creating new forms by manipulating structures inherited from the great Italian tradition, loading them with bold harmonic progressions which had little or nothing to do with what was happening then in Italy, though they were in step with the work of French, Austrian and German colleagues. In his work on Puccini, Julian Budden describes Puccini as a gifted and original composer, noting