This February 16, the Teatro San Carlo Choir and Orchestra of Naples present the world premiere of Fabio Vacchi’s Eternapoli, a monologue for two voices, mixed chorus and large orchestra. Book by Giuseppe Montesano. Toni Servillo recites. Conducted by Donato Renzetti.
The narration in Eternapoli takes its cue from the novel 'Di questa vita menzognera' by Giuseppe Montesano. He talks about his book in the program notes. Here are some excerpts:

… I began writing the novel that would become 'Di questa vita menzognera' two months after 9/11. It was my way of reacting to the fear. Meanwhile, the Negromonte family of Naples had appeared before my eyes. I saw them as universal in their vulgarity and violence aimed at subordinating everything and everyone to their own pleasure. The family made money and forged alliances with a fake democratic central government to basically take over all of Italy. I set 'Di questa vita menzognera' in Naples for the simple reason that an author is at his best when he writes about the places he knows, the places he’s bound to by the contradictions of love. […]  
The Negromontes eventually got to the point where they figured that […] their system of gaining wealth had reached its climax, and sooner or later would start to decline. So how could they keep getting richer? In terms of business, the only thing left to do was to put the lives of actual people up for sale and transform existence itself into one big, universal theme park where people act out their lives instead of living them, […] and Calebbano, a wicked manipulator in the style of Caliban-Prospero, undertook a project that he himself considered ingenious: Eternapoli.[...] 

Eternapoli is the result of intense collaboration between Fabio Vacchi, Giuseppe Montesano and Toni Servillo.

Once again, from Giuseppe Montesano in the program notes:

[...] We worked really hard on Eternapoli; I wrote the narration, and Toni would recite it back to me, and then for Vacchi. We discussed it a lot, and we also talked a lot about Vacchi’s take on the music for a work like this […]; I did several rewrites; the three of us debated the relevance of having the chorus sing in Neapolitan dialect. It was all part of adapting the language of a novel to a musical creation. And when Fabio finished the score of Eternapoli a few months ago, we realized he’d written music that was not, as is so often the case, something outside the narration, but music that captured the essence of the narration in a way that words cannot, which is something only music can do […].



Eternapoli for actor, actress, mixed chorus and large orchestra
3. 2. cor.i. 2. bcl. 3. / 6.3.3.1. / timp  perc (5) / harp  piano-cel / strings

Toni Servillo: photo by Masiar Pasquali