Talk Show (2009)
Opera in one act
Libretto by Riccardo Riccardi inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke
Characters: Moderator, mezzo-soprano; Walter, bass; Stanislao, tenor; Caterina, coloratura soprano; Eugenia, soprano; Mr. Savant, baritone; Outsider, baritone; Director, cameramen, sound and light engineers, photographers
Instrumentation: Hn, Accord, Synth, Strings (or Vln, Vla, Vlc, D-B)
Duration: ca. 1h 10m
Premiere: Lucca, Complesso di San Micheletto, 09-04-2009
Laura Dalfino, Mirella De Vita, Sop; Sara Bacchelli, Mez; Marco Voleri, Ten; Fabrizio Corucci, Andrea Paolucci, Bar; Massimiliano Galli, Bs; Orchestra: Contempoartensemble: Mauro Ceccanti, Cond; Rosanna Monti, Set design and costumes; Valerio Valoriani, Dir; Maria Teresa Elena, Live TV Dir

The inspiration for this opera comes from Central European literature. To be explicit, these two sources: Das Ereignis. Eine ereignislose Geschichte and Und doch in den Tod, short-stories from Totentänze by Rainer Maria Rilke. The action in the first of Rilke’s stories takes place in the parlor of a noblewoman at the beginning of the XX century. Each guest must recount an event in his own life. In Riccardi’s adaptation the setting is changed to a modern reality show, a Talk Show. In place of Rilke’s genteel characters, Riccardi’s characters are participants in a television reality show, recounting their tales and unwittingly revealing their personalities. The Talk Show ends with an episode from Rilke’s second story. A husband, crazed with jealousy, discovers by chance that the man who is trying to dissuade him from committing suicide is, in fact, the man his wife has taken as her lover.

SYNOPSIS

In a television studio the new episode of a reality show is about to begin. Three famous guests and two people taken at random from among the audience of the live broadcast are invited to talk on camera about an important event in their lives. The show is moderated by a woman who directs the sequence of the interviews and the pacing of the episode. A famous artist begins and tells of a bitter episode in his adolescence. The second is a journalist and screenwriter. His tale is about his love of a woman who drove him nearly mad, but whom he forgot when he meet another woman who is the true love of his life. It’s then the turn of a winner of a chance to appear on the show, a very narcissistic woman who is unsatisfied in her difficult marriage.

After her, the moderator invites one of the guests chosen at random to speak, but although he had agreed to be chosen, now he is reluctant to talk. He believes he has nothing very interesting to say. He has waited his whole life for even a small event that might give his life some meaning, but nothing has ever happened to him. Sometimes he was even on the verge of committing a crime, solely to provoke a shock in his gray and sad existence.

The last woman interviewed, another person randomly drawn from the audience, confesses that she had never expected any singular event in her life. She had already had everything she wanted: a husband she loved and a peaceful existence—perhaps even banal. After three years of an idyllic life together, she had only wanted that life to continue unchanged and was certainly unprepared for anything as tragic as what had actually happened. To become a widow so young.

Suddenly an outsider breaks into the studio. He is armed and wants, at all costs, to be heard before the cameras. Waving a gun, while everyone reacts in fright, he says, almost sobbing, that his wife betrays him. Only the journalist is courageous enough to approach and try to calm him. The journalist tells him how he too once considered carrying out an ill-considered act for a woman with whom he was madly in love but who had disappeared without a trace. Eventually the journalist had succeeded in forgetting her. The gunman begins to grow calmer, but before he has put the gun down, the journalist mentions that he felt complete apathy when, just few days before, Elena—the name of his lost love—had called to tell him that she had moved to Corpolò. At the sound of his wife’s name and the name of the village, the gunman, in a fit of complete insanity, kills himself.

The moderator tries to discover Elena’s telephone number from the journalist. The opera ends with her promise of a phone interview with the widow of the dead man. The show must go on!