Fernandez-Lopez on Turandot and the Exhaustion of Power: Ritual, Genealogy, Sacrifice, and the Twilight of Civilizations

Edgar A. Fernandez-Lopez has published Turandot and the Exhaustion of Power: Ritual, Genealogy, Sacrifice, and the Twilight of Civilizations.

This article reinterprets Puccini's Turandot not as a fairy tale of feminine cruelty overcome by erotic persistence, but as a twilight drama of exhausted civilizational power. Recovering the libretto's overlooked Tartar genealogy, it argues that Calaf belongs symbolically to the very lineage of the "King of the Tartars" implicated in Turandot's ancestral wound, so that his crossing of the riddle-threshold is recognition rather than conquest. Through textual and musical analysis, and through comparison with Gozzi's Adelma, the study reclaims Liù-not Calaf-as the opera's moral center: a figure of concealed sovereignty whose gratuitous sacrifice, a love detached from possession, dissolves the sacrificial economy sustaining the imperial order. Situating the work alongside Wagnerian twilight, Shakespearean tragedy, and the Girardian theory of sacred violence, the article reads Turandot as a meditation on how civilizations perish spiritually before they perish materially-on how ritual and law outlive the meaning they once served.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.