Franco Alfano nine months on the following concluding duet and at his death had left behind a whole ream of sketches... Alfano had to reconstruct...according to his best assessment...and with his imagination and magnifying glass" since Puccini's material "had not really been legible." "Alfano's reputation has also suffered [IC:along with Mascagni], understandably, because of his willingness to associate himself closely with Mussolini's Fascist government." Alex Ross, in "The New Yorker", notes that a new ending of "Turandot" composed by Luciano Berio premiered in 2002 is preferred by some critics for making a more satisfactory resolution of Turandot's change of heart, and of
Sakùntala Sakùntala La leggenda di Sakùntala (titled Sakùntala in its revised version) is a three-act opera by Franco Alfano, who wrote his own libretto, basing his work on Kalidasa's 5th-century BC drama "Abhijñānaśākuntalam". It was first performed at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 10 December 1921. The full score and orchestral materials were believed to have been destroyed when an allied bomb damaged the archives of Alfano's publisher Ricordi during World War II, so Alfano reconstructed the opera and it was performed at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome on 5 January 1952 with the shortened title of "Sakùntala". During preparations