Act I, in Peking, before the imperial palace. A mandarin reads out the edict: Princess Turandot will marry the suitor of royal blood who solves her three riddles, and whoever fails will lose his head. The Prince of Persia has failed and will die at moonrise. While the executioner sharpens the blade, the crowd cheers him on and calls on the moon to hurry; when the condemned man appears, so young, that same crowd begs for mercy. Then Turandot appears, commands silence and, with a gesture, orders the executioner to proceed. Among the throng is Calaf, an exiled Tartar prince who has just found his blind father, Timur, again, led by the slave girl Liù. He sees Turandot and decides to challenge her. In Turandot (Giacomo Puccini, with a libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, premiered in 1926), Calaf solves the three riddles and, since she resists the marriage, offers her a way out: if she guesses his name before dawn, she may execute him. Liù, under torture, stabs herself rather than reveal it. Puccini died leaving the opera unfinished at that point; Franco Alfano composed the ending, in which Turandot surrenders to love.
// The theoryPunishment as a spectacle of power
In Punishment and Social Structure (1939), Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer argued that every society punishes according to its economic and political structure, not according to the seriousness of crimes. Michel Foucault took up the idea in Discipline and Punish (1975) and illustrated it with the spectacle of the scaffold: under the Ancien Régime, public execution served less to punish the condemned than to stage the absolute power of the sovereign over the bodies of his subjects, before a people who were both spectators and witnesses. Those rituals also carried a risk: the crowd could side with the condemned.
The crowd and the executioner
Turandot stages with precision the spectacle of the scaffold that Foucault described. The executions are public, announced by decree, follow a fixed ritual and have the people as spectators. The opera’s first chorus calls for blood and sharpens the executioner’s sword; minutes later, on seeing the young condemned man, it calls for mercy. Foucault pointed to that ambivalence as the great danger of public executions: the crowd that comes to celebrate power can turn against it. Turandot does not yield, because yielding would show that her power has limits.
// The subjectA princess avenging an ancient crime
In her great second-act aria, Turandot explains the origin of her law: thousands of years ago, her ancestress, Princess Lo-u-Ling, was raped and murdered by a foreign invader. Turandot has sworn to avenge her, and no man will possess her. Her cruelty is therefore a defense: the riddles are a wall against her ancestress’s fate. That does not excuse the heads hanging from the walls, but it changes the reading of the character. Turandot punishes in the name of a victim, and her law turns an inherited trauma into a system of extermination.
Turandot’s other moments confirm that her law is a system, not a whim. In Act II, before posing the first riddle, she swears in “In questa reggia” that no man will ever possess her and warns Calaf that the riddles are three and death is one. When he solves the third, whose answer is her own name, Turandot does not accept the result: she throws herself at the feet of her father, the Emperor Altoum, and begs him not to hand her over to the stranger, and only the sovereign’s given word forces her to comply. In Act III, the heralds proclaim her new order: that night no one in Peking shall sleep, on pain of death, until the name is found. Liù is tortured in front of her and, baffled by her silence, the princess asks where she finds such strength. Liù answers that it comes from love. The power on display at the scaffold has no answer to that.
Turandot
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// The crackAn economic theory for a symbolic punishment
Rusche and Kirchheimer’s theory is economic: it links forms of punishment to the labor market and the value of labor. Turandot’s executions have no economic function; they are symbolic. That is why Foucault’s reading, which centers on power rather than economics, fits better than that of the original authors.
Moreover, Turandot is a European fantasy about China, and critics have pointed to it as an example of orientalism: an exotic and bloody court against which the foreign hero brings love and humanity. Reading it as a portrait of a real penal system would be a mistake: it is a portrait of what Europe imagined Eastern power to be.
Public executions today
Public executions disappeared from Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly because the authorities feared their effect on the crowd. But they have not disappeared entirely from the world: Amnesty International continues to document public executions in some countries. Research on the death penalty has found no solid evidence that it deters more than life imprisonment. Its function, as in Turandot, is above all symbolic.
Three key ideas
- The political economy of punishment (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939) and Foucault (1975) hold that punishment responds to the structure of power, and that public execution was a spectacle of sovereignty before the people.
- Turandot has the suitors who fail her riddles publicly beheaded, to avenge a murdered ancestress, and when Calaf succeeds, she orders Liù tortured to discover his name.
- The crack: the original theory is economic and Turandot’s punishments are symbolic, and the opera is an orientalist fantasy about China, not a portrait of a real penal system.
Sources · further reading
- Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O. (1939). Punishment and Social Structure. Columbia University Press.
- Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Gallimard.
- Garland, D. (1990). Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. University of Chicago Press.
- Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Turandot?
Turandot (“Princesa de Pekín”) is a villain from Opera, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. The riddles were three.
Why does Turandot (Princess of Peking) become a villain?
Foucault read the scaffold as a theatre of power, and Turandot directs it in person: when the people of Peking beg mercy for a condemned prince, she refuses it with a gesture.
Which criminological theory explains Turandot?
Turandot's case is analysed through Political economy of punishment. The political economy of punishment, by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939), and Michel Foucault’s history of the prison (1975) hold that ways of punishing respond not to crime but to the structure of power, and that public execution was for centuries a spectacle of sovereignty. In Turandot (Giacomo Puccini, first staged in 1926), Princess Turandot subjects her suitors to three riddles and has them beheaded if they fail, in public ceremonies before the people of Peking. When Prince Calaf succeeds and challenges her to guess his name before dawn, Turandot orders that no one shall sleep and has the slave girl Liù tortured; she takes her own life rather than reveal it.
