MUSIC : Dear Puccini: My Love Life Has Gone to Pot; What Do You Suggest? : Opera: Although not billed as an advice-to-the-lovelorn piece, ‘Turandot,’ which opens Friday at the Performing Arts Center, contains a strong message about relations between the sexes.

Opera generally isn’t regarded as a place to turn for Advice to the Lovelorn. But it’s long been a pet theory of this writer that Puccini’s “Turandot” has something vital to say about power relations between the sexes.

On the surface, “Turandot,” which opens Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, might not appear to offer contemporary audiences much in the way of serious commentary on love relationships.

After all, the work is based on a fairy tale about a beautiful-but-cruel princess who kills those who would love her.

But as with all enduring myths, beneath the entertainment-oriented particulars of the story lie some universal truths.

Other composers had tackled this subject before Puccini began composing it in 1921. Antonio Bazzini, Puccini’s professor at the Milan Conservatory, wrote a “Turanda” in 1867, and Ferruccio Busoni wrote a “Turandot” in 1917. (Elements of the Busoni opera reappear in Puccini’s, but greatly transformed.)

Puccini had been hunting for new material and new heroines who were not in the passive Butterfly or Mimi mold. Turandot, the icy princess, fit the bill.

As it turned out, the work would be the composer’s swan song. In fact, he did not live to finish it. But more of that later.

The story has basically a mystery plot:

Wooers for the Princess’s hand must submit to a trial in which she poses three Sphinxian riddles. If they can answer them, they win her hand and the throne of China. If they fail, they must accept the penalty, which is beheading.

Turandot is so beautiful that there is no end of suitors. But all fail the test. Then, one day, an Unknown Prince arrives; his encounter with Turandot is the subject of Puccini’s opera.

But the real mystery extends beyond the answers to the riddles or the name of the Unknown Prince.

To understand the point, some background information is provided in Turandot’s cruelly demanding Act II aria, “In questa Reggia.” She explains that thousands of years ago, one of her ancestors--the Princess Lou-Ling--was carried off, ravished and murdered by an invading warlord. In revenge, Turandot, who now embodies the spirit of Lou-Ling, will take the life of any man who desires her.

One must accept the legitimacy of her claim. There has been a terrible crime of aggression and misused power against a woman by a man. The question is: How can such a brutal crime be expiated?

The opera will propose various solutions, rejecting each one until posing the answer.

First is Turandot’s solution: blood for blood, revenge through more murders. But how many will it take to pay for the original crime? An endless series of executions have turned China into a charnel house, as the three court ministers, Ping, Pang and Pong, lament. Revenge, obviously, is not the answer.

Nor, interestingly, is turning the tables on Turandot by solving the riddles.

The Unknown Prince gives the right answers, thereby winning power over Turandot. But he wants more than that, and the opera proposes that trading one kind of power for another is not the solution.

When Turandot protests that no man will take her willingly, the Unknown Prince rejects the path of repeating the original rape. He wants her to love him.

He proposes a new riddle: If she can find out his name before dawn, she may kill him.

Turandot agrees and orders that no one in Peking is to sleep until his name is discovered.

In desperation, the three ministers and the people seek out the prince and offer him bribes, threats and entreaties to flee. Ping conjures up horrifying images of soldiers roving through the streets, banging at doors, demanding the prince’s name and killing those who cannot give it. Of course, no one can.

Still, the prince refuses to reveal his identity.

At this point, soldiers drag in the prince’s father and the servant Liu who secretly loves the prince. Sizing up the situation quickly, she swears that only she knows his name.

Turandot orders the girl tortured until she reveals it.

After great agony, Liu stabs herself to death to keep the secret but not before predicting that Turandot will love the prince as much as she does.

Here Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppi Adami and Renato Simoni, take an enormous gamble and--for many people--lose it. Liu is sacrificed for Turandot and quite frankly many don’t feel that the icy princess is worth it.

But her death serves as the turning point.

Liu is as innocent as Lou-Ling was. Her act of self-sacrifice at long last calms the bloodthirsty, superstitious people, transforms the three cynical ministers and even prompts Turandot to realize that she loves the prince. When she declares her love for the prince, he, in a transport of emotion, reveals his name: Calaf the son of Timur.

At first, Turandot is intoxicated with the knowledge and summons everyone to announce her triumph. But she quickly abjures the power, the two are united and the kingdom rejoices in the promise of the future.

Both have rejected the solution of power over one another by willingly giving the power of life and death to the other.

At this point in the opera, one longs to hear the crowning love duet between the two. But it will never come, at least not as Puccini would have written it.

Puccini died after composing the music for the scene of Liu’s death. Conductor Arturo Toscanini, Puccini’s longtime friend, assigned opera composer Franco Alfano the unenviable task of completing the opera from Puccini’s sketches.

For the climactic love duet, Puccini had indicated what he wanted: “Find here the characteristic, lovely, unusual melody.”

He did not live to find it. Alfano also did not find it. Alfano has been criticized for not being a Puccini. But then, who else was?

Conducting the premiere at La Scala, Milan, on April 25, 1926, Toscanini went so far as to put down the baton after the last measures that Puccini wrote, turn to the audience and declare that the opera was over. In subsequent performances, he conducted the rest of the act as completed by Alfano.

Perhaps the melody could never be found, and perhaps this adds even more to the mystique of “Turandot.” It remains a dream as is, for many, the ideal relationship between the sexes.

Opera Pacific will present Puccini’s “Turandot,” Friday through March 4, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, in Costa Mesa. Tickets: $20 to $55. Information: (714) 546-7372.