Duetto is a combination of two iconic Italian one-act-comic operas—Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna—into a sparkling single work of intimate, laugh-out-loud entertainment first performed in Macau’s iconic Teatro Dom Pedro V.
Both works feature a soprano, baritone and non-singing mute actor. This is perhaps less coincidental than it might first appear, since Wolf-Ferrari was deliberately referencing La Serva Padrona is his work from almost two centuries later.
The fact that the musical requirements for the two operas are identical allowed them to be played through, with the characters repeating in the two works: these are essentially the same people, something emphasized by carrying over symbolic elements from La Serva Padrona into Il Segreto di Susanna.
The two operas were wrapped in another narrative of a perhaps not entirely fictional small opera company putting on an opera buffa double bill. The two protagonists have a budding relationship which maps onto the plots of the two operas (intermission includes an engagement).
La Serva Padrona took advantage of the fact that Macau had, in the mid-19th century painter George Chinnery, an iconic expat; his portraits and views of the city are among the best-known images of the then Portuguese enclave. Serva’s protagonist became “Giorgo”, a painter in the process of painting a couple of portraits; the view out the large triple windows might have been mistaken for a Chinnery watercolor.
Il segreto di Susanna was set in the 1960s in the aftermath of a party; the couple’s well-situated apartment has a view over the Dom Pedro V Theatre itself, which can seen through the windows.
