Tempo Data from Broadcast Performances of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera, 1961 – 2009

The works of well-known composers active as recording technology developed and as the recording industry emerged thus make ideal case studies. Giacomo Puccini is uniquely suited to a study of tradition through technological means: he has perhaps the best-documented relationship to advances in technology and the resulting shift in entertainment aesthetics of any composer of this era. Of his twelve operas, Turandot is the only major work whose premiere post-dates the advent of electronically captured and controlled sound recording, and thus position at the crossroads of technical practices and social aesthetics stemming from technological conditions in multimedia entertainment in the 1920s.

Of the major opera houses in the world, New York’s Metropolitan Opera has perhaps the most comprehensively documented performance history. The launch of “The Metropolitan Opera Archives” online with open access in 2005 made it the most accessible source of information for operatic performing history...