She wants to find out the name of the handsome stud in love with her, just so she can kill him. He’s actually quoting his beloved Princess Turandot. The verb dormire (“to sleep”) appears here in the type of subjunctive known as congiuntivo esortativo, which really suggests the meaning “I desire that nobody should sleep.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, grammar nerds.Ĭlick to load video But why does the singer desire that nobody should sleep? What’s wrong with sleeping? It’s usually translated as “none shall sleep” but it’s actually quite a sophisticated phrase. ‘Nessun Dorma’: The Story Behind Pavarotti’s Famous Aria What does ‘Nessun Dorma’ actually mean? How did Puccini fill ‘Nessun Dorma’ with so much love and hope, when the rest of the opera is so cruel? Scroll down to discover the story behind the famous aria featuring Pavarotti’s immortal recording. And yet the opera also contains one of the greatest tenor arias ever written, which is guaranteed to tingle even the most opera-resistant of spines.

Quite apart from the beheadings, and tortures, and a forced suicide, there’s enough sadism left over to keep a conference of psychiatrists chinwagging for decades. Even those assiduous purveyors of cruelty the Brothers Grimm never created anything quite as grim as the plot of Puccini’s fairytale opera Turandot, which premiered on 25 April 1926 at La Scala, Milan.

Puccini opera nessun dorma