Il testamento

Il testamento, a play with musical numbers, features three characters (two sopranos and a mezzo) and a small instrumental ensemble (piano, electric guitar and strings). 

This work was born from the expansion of a previous work for one singer and a pianist who were asked to enact a prose text. In the current version there are instead three singers, two sopranos and a mezzo-soprano who also enact spoken dialog between musical numbers. 

The previous version of Il testamento (The Will), that was in English, was premiered at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin on March 26th 2014. The new version, in Italian, was written in 2020 and premiered at the Teatro Torlonia, Rome on October 13th 2021. In this version, a new character and some side plots are added, and the text is extensively revised.

Synopsis

Paola and Claudia, two sisters, meet the day of their father's funeral in the house where they lived as girls. Now they have to clean it out. Their father had been a stellar pianist before an accident radically changed his life.

It's a return for Claudia, who has lived away for years, but it's routine for Paola, who has never moved from the town where she was born. An elderly service woman, who has worked for the family for years, completes the cast, the guardian of their shared memories. 

Memories return for the two sisters and, with the memories, reproaches. When their talk grows in candor and increasing rancor, old issues and accusations re-emerge resulting finally in an open quarrel with serious mutual accusations. 

But Paola and Claudia have a practical duty to perform: they are in that house to empty it. They have to decide what to throw away, what to keep and above all, how to divide the furniture and the paintings that belonged to their father. 

In their browsing through things, they find thousands of objects, but they also find a libretto and some isolated arias of a new opera. With increasing interest and emotion, they start singing those arias at the piano But where is the whole opera? And who was the composer of this opera?...