Threnody (Trenodia) or ‘[if]… this is man’ is a ‘lay’ oratorio in five parts. The work can be performed also as a theatrical piece where the spoken parts and the instrumental and vocal music take turns while accompanied by a bare and essential choreography. A simple dramaturgic path - somehow almost evanescent - was built to form the spoken part, composed by reading a miscellany of poems and proses written by poets and soldiers who took part in the Great War or wrote about it. The music was written by Pier Paolo Scattolin in 2017: in addition to the original material evocative echoes can be heard of some melodies sung in the ‘ordinary custom’ of life in the trenches, during the alienating and often long pauses of war. Threnody is not a commemorative piece, but a space in time and sound to reflect upon man’s suffering. To reflect upon the soldiers’s reasons, reactions and visions giving way to behaviours significantly different from those of the high officers in charge, thus unmasking the squalid strategies of power.