gets a brand new ending premiered in Washington, with music by a composer known for video game tunes and a librettist who produced 'Succession'The Kennedy Center premieres a new ending for one of the world's most famous operas on Saturday in Washington, D.C. The opera isComposer Giacomo Puccini died shortly before finishing his masterpiece, leaving just musical sketches for the ending — sketches that his student Franco Alfano filled out posthumously.
"I felt like Puccini gave us amazing women in all of his operas. The conclusion might be death but usually the death is a kind of triumph, whether its Tosca or Butterfly."Zambello wanted something different, to correct the way China and the characters were depicted in the work, stereotypes that provoked China to effectively ban the opera
"But that said, I also don't want to slavishly try to impersonate Puccini, because nobody wants to hear a second-rate Puccini, but maybe somebody might want to hear a first-rate Christopher Tin," he adds.The 18-minute new ending does in fact reprise some of the themes heard in the earlier parts of the opera."Sometimes in very subtle ways, sometimes in clever ways," Tin says, noting that at one point he used a Puccini melody but inverted it.