'Senza mamma, bimbo, tu sei morto' (Angelica) (Suor Angelica)

Suor Angelica is the middle panel of Il trittico, the three one-act operas Puccini presented together at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 14 December 1918 — a premiere he could not attend because of the war. Giovacchino Forzano's libretto places a noblewoman in a seventeenth-century convent, cut off for seven years from the illegitimate child she bore, until an aunt arrives to tell her the boy is dead. The cast is entirely female. Puccini is said to have played the score through at the convent at Vicopelago, where his own sister was a nun.