Ennio Dinacci

Once upon a time in Campania Ennio Dinacci

The opera "Once Upon a Time in Campania" is simply a delicate and poignant love story, between people of the people, in an unspecified time and place in Southern Italy. Although written in the form of a fairy tale, it is above all an Opera di Scena, written in a prose and narrative dynamics typical of melodrama, to which the author openly refers! This is due both to the musicality sought in the dialogues, and to the alternation of prose writing with more lyrical stylistic forms, such as the use of verses, nursery rhymes, songs, or dances, as well as the explicit references to the Neapolitan musical tradition that, for various reasons, is evoked or is present in history. The story itself is as surreal as it is plausible. Teresa is a well-liked person, but some of her little childhood obsessions complicate her life and, as the years go by, right in her married life, deflagrate, making married life more and more precarious and complicated. However, we are talking about a fairy tale and at the same time a melodrama, in which dream and reality, real or imaginary situations, overlap, without defined boundaries, up to a climax, also from the Italian Opera House, even moving away from the fairytale genre of belonging. The dramatic development of the story leads the reader/spectator to feel very involved in the events staged, including the more clearly dramatic ones, which characterize the highlights. In this sense, and beyond the form or genre, Once upon a time in Campania, he stages, in a real or imaginary theater, a drama/fairy that owes much to the Tradition of Italian Opera, to which he clearly seems to be inspired and want to belong. Like all the author's works, his writing has known a long gestation, passing from the formal structure of a simple novella to a screenplay, up to the one presented here, as an example of that hybrid writing, preferred by the author: that is, that of a theatrical work, on a formal level, but basically a borderline work, suspended in a multidimensional usability, which in this case leads to a popular melodrama. The fairy tale Once Upon a Time in Campania was written to talk to us, in light language, about the difficulties and crises of love and family life. In the end, it is a work about the complexity of human nature and, also in this sense, it is really a melodrama... that, proceeding with a lyrical language within an imaginative context, leads us with a light hand... towards an ending, really surprising.