Turandot (; see below) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, posthumously completed by Franco Alfano in 1926, and set to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. The opera is set in China and follows the Prince Calaf, who falls in love with the cold Princess Turandot. In order to win her hand in marriage, a suitor must solve three riddles, with a wrong answer resulting in their execution. Calaf passes the test, but Turandot refuses to marry him. He offers her a way out: if she is able to guess his name before dawn the next day, he will accept death. Puccini left the opera unfinished at the time of his death in 1924; Franco Alfano completed it in 1926. Origin and pronunciation of the name The title of the opera is derived from the Persian term Turandokht (, 'daughter of Turan'), a name frequently given to Central Asian princesses in Persian poetry. Turan is a region of Central Asia that was once part of the Persian Empire. Dokht is a contraction of dokhtar (daughter); the kh and t are both pronounced. According to Puccini scholar Patrick Vincent Casali, the final t is silent in the opera's and title character's name, meaning it is pronounced . Soprano Rosa Raisa, who created the title role, said that neither Puccini nor Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the first performances, ever pronounced the final t. Similarly, prominent Turandot Eva Turner did not pronounce the final t in television interviews. Casali 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: in Italian, the name would be pronounced Turandotta. In the Venetian dialect of Carlo Gozzi, the final syllables are usually dropped and words end in a consonant, so it would be pronounced Turandott. Composition history The beginnings of Turandot can likely be found in Haft Peykar, a twelfth-century epic by the Persian poet Nizami. One of the stories in Haft Peykar features a Russian princess. In 1722, François Pétis de la Croix published his Les Mille et Un Jours (The Thousand and One Days), a collection of stories which were purportedly taken from Middle Eastern folklore and mythologies. One of