A mock wake staged to deceive the law. It could be a scene from Gianni Schicchi, you laugh, you even laugh a lot. Then, suddenly, the bombs: everything changes and a comprimario, one of those characters we had barely noticed giving color to a scene, comes back to the fore announcing that his wife is dead under the rubble. The false and the true. This is how the first act of Napoli milionaria closes: opera buffa and tragedy, the art of making do that becomes playful farce and history that bursts in violent and ruthless. A world is encapsulated in this second collaboration (1977) between Eduardo De Filippo and Nino Rota (the first had been the 1959 fairy tale Uno scoiattolo in gamba), which would also be the composer’s last work.

The Jovine family and the microcosm of the Neapolitan lowlands are struggling for survival amid the last fires of fascism, World War II, and the euphorias and contradictions of the postwar period. Rota’s music fits like a glove to the facets of the bitter comedy, nonchalantly mastering different languages, registers and moods. De Filippo rewrites his own text, showing himself to be a librettist in his own right, and Napoli milionaria! is a true masterpiece of 20th-century melodrama, a work written with the wisdom proper to the true greats, with a depth of thought and language placed at the service of the theater, of a hopeless tale, very harsh, yet multifaceted even amid smiles, ironies and sweetness.