Le Testament de Villon is an opera composed in 1923 by the American poet Ezra Pound, with assistance from George Antheil.
He was interested in early music in general, perhaps partly through his contact with Arnold Dolmetsch; he was particularly fond of the repertoire of the Provençal troubadours.
The result has little in the way of instrumentation, harmony or dialogue, but is characterised by detailed and complex rhythmic notation designed to reproduce the rhythms of the text.
[1] In July 1965 it was performed as a ballet under the direction Gian-Carlo Menotti at the Teatro Caio Melisso of Spoleto, in Umbria in central Italy, as part of the Festival dei Due Mondi;[4] the first performance in the United States was conducted by Robert Hughes at the Zellerbach Auditorium of the University of California at Berkeley in 1971;[5] and the first British public performance took place in Cambridge in 1985.
[6] In 1973 the opera was performed in Germany at the Hamburgische Staatsoper under Friedrich Götz and with additional music by Hans Ludwig Hirsch.