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 seven days of the week, the seven colors and the seven corresponding planets. This particular story is the story of Tuesday, being told to King Bahram by his companion of the red dome, associated with Mars. In the very first line of this story, the protagonist is identified as a Russian princess. The name of the opera is based on Turan-Dokht (daughter of Turan), which is a common name used in Persian poetry for Central Asian princesses.

The opera's version of the story is set in China and involves Prince Calaf, who falls in love with the cold Princess Turandot. To obtain permission to marry her, a suitor has to solve three riddles; any wrong answer results in death. Calaf passes the test, but Turandot still refuses to marry him. He offers her a way out: if she is able to learn his name before dawn the next day, then at daybreak he will die. In the original story by Nizami, the princess sets four conditions. The first is "a good name and good deeds", and then the three challenges.

The opera was unfinished at the time of Puccini's death in 1924, and was completed by Franco Alfano in 1926. The first performance was held at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 25 April 1926 and conducted by Arturo Toscanini. This performance included only Puccini's music and not Alfano's additions. The first performance of the opera as completed by Alfano was the following night, 26 April, although it is disputed whether this was conducted by Toscanini again or by Ettore Panizza.

Origin and pronunciation of the name
Turandot is a Persian word and name that means "the daughter of Turan", Turan being a region of Central Asia, formerly part of the Persian Empire. The name of the opera is taken from Persian Turandokht, with dokht being a contraction of dokhtar (daughter); the kh and t are both pronounced. However, note that the original protagonist in Nizami's story is identified in the very first line of the Persian poem as being from Russia. The story is known as the story of the "Red Dome" among the "Seven Domes" (Haft Ghonbad) stories in Nizami's Haft Peykar (i.e., the seven figures or beauties).

According to Puccini scholar Patrick Vincent Casali, the final t is silent in the opera's and title character's name, making it sound. Soprano Rosa Raisa, who created the title role, says that Puccini never pronounced the final t. Eva Turner, a prominent Turandot, did not pronounce the final t, as television interviews with her attest. Casali also maintains that the musical setting of many of Calaf's utterances of the name makes sounding the final t all but impossible. On the other hand, Simonetta Puccini, the composer's granddaughter and keeper of the Villa Puccini and Mausoleum, has said that the final t must be pronounced. Italo Marchini questioned her about this in 2002. Ms. Puccini said that in Italian the name would be Turandotta. In the Venetian dialect of Carlo Gozzi the final syllables are usually dropped and words end in a consonant, ergo Turandott, as the name has been made Venetian.

In 1710, while writing the first biography of Genghis Khan, the French scholar François Pétis de La Croix published a book of tales and fables combining various Asian literary themes. One of his longest and best stories derived from the history of Mongol princess Khutulun. In his adaptation, however, she bore the title Turandot, meaning "Turkish Daughter", the daughter of Kaidu. Instead of challenging her suitors in wrestling, Pétis de La Croix had her confront them with three riddles. In his more dramatic version, instead of wagering mere horses, the suitor had to forfeit his life if he failed to answer correctly.

Fifty years later, the popular Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi made her story into a drama of a "tigerish woman" of "unrelenting pride". In a combined effort by two of the greatest literary talents of the era, Friedrich von Schiller translated the play into German as Turandot, Prinzessin von China, and Goethe directed it on the stage in Weimar in 1802.

Composition history
The story of Turandot was taken from a Persian collection of stories called The Book of One Thousand and One Days (1722 French translation Les Mille et un jours by François Pétis de la Croix – not to be confused with its sister work The Book of One Thousand and One Nights) – where the character of "Turandokht" as a cold princess was found. The story of Turandokht is one of the best known from de la Croix's translation. The plot respects the classical unities of time, space and action.

Puccini first began working on Turandot in March 1920 after meeting with librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. In his impatience he began composition in January 1921 before Adami and Simoni had even produced the text for the libretto. Baron Fassini Camossi, the former Italian diplomat to China, gave Puccini as a gift a music box which played a number of Chinese melodies. Puccini used three of these in the opera, including the national anthem (heard during the appearance of the Emperor Altoum) and, most memorably, the folk melody "Mo Li Hua" (Jasmine Flower) which is first heard sung by the children's chorus after the invocation to the moon in act 1, and becomes a sort of 'leitmotif' for the princess throughout the opera. Puccini commissioned a set of 13 gongs constructed by the Tronci family specifically for Turandot. Decades later, percussionist Howard Van Hyning of the New York City Opera had been searching for a proper set of gongs and obtained the original set from the Stivanello Costume Company, which had acquired the gongs as the result of winning a bet. In 1987 he bought the gongs for his collection, paying thousands of dollars for the set, which he described as having "colorful, intense, centered and perfumed" sound qualities.

By March 1924 Puccini had completed the opera up to the final duet. However, he was unsatisfied with the text of the final duet, and did not continue until 8 October, when he chose Adami's fourth version of the duet text. On 10 October he was diagnosed with throat cancer and on 24 November went to Brussels, Belgium, for treatment. There he underwent a new and experimental radiation therapy treatment. Puccini and his wife never knew how serious the cancer was, as the news was revealed only to his son. Puccini, however, seems to have had some inkling of the possible seriousness of his condition since, before leaving for Brussels, he visited Toscanini and begged him, "Don't let my Turandot die". He died of a heart attack on 29 November 1924, when it had seemed that the radium treatment was succeeding. His step-daughter Fosca was in fact joyfully writing a letter to an English friend of the family, Sibyl Seligman, telling her that the cancer was shrinking when she was called to her father's bedside because of the heart attack.

Completion of the score after Puccini's death
When Puccini died, the first two of the three acts were fully composed, including orchestration. Puccini had composed and fully orchestrated act 3 up until Liù's death and funeral cortege. In the sense of finished music, this was the last music composed by Puccini. He left behind 36 pages of sketches on 23 sheets for the end of Turandot. Some sketches were in the form of "piano-vocal" or "short score," including vocal lines with "two to four staves of accompaniment with occasional notes on orchestration." These sketches supplied music for some, but not all, of the final portion of the libretto.

Puccini left instructions that Riccardo Zandonai should finish the opera. Puccini's son Tonio objected, and eventually Franco Alfano was chosen to flesh out the sketches after Vincenzo Tommasini (who had completed Boito's Nerone after the composer's death) and Pietro Mascagni were rejected. Puccini's publisher Tito Ricordi II decided on Alfano because his opera La leggenda di Sakùntala resembled Turandot in its setting and heavy orchestration. Alfano provided a first version of the ending with a few passages of his own, and even a few sentences added to the libretto which was not considered complete even by Puccini himself. After the severe criticisms by Ricordi and the conductor Arturo Toscanini, he was forced to write a second, strictly censored version that followed Puccini's sketches more closely, to the point where he did not set some of Adami's text to music because Puccini had not indicated how he wanted it to sound. Ricordi's real concern was not the quality of Alfano's work, but that he wanted the end of Turandot to sound as if it had been written by Puccini, and Alfano's editing had to be seamless. Of this version, about three minutes were cut for performance by Toscanini, and it is this shortened version that is usually performed.