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FULL BABEL 46 (Xavier Montsalvatge) Barcelona 2024 ESMUC
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Babel 46   
- Composer: Montsalvatge Xavier   
- Libretto: Xavier Montsalvatge    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Sala 4 Alícia de Larrocha, ESMUC, Barcelona, Spain  
- Recorded: 2024
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: unknown
- Conductor: Ernest Martínez Izquierdo  
- Orchestra: Orquestra Simfònica de l’ESMUC  
- Stage Director: Susana Egea  
- Costume Designer:   
Information about the Recording
- Published by: ESCOLA SUPERIOR DE MÚSICA DE CATALUNYA (ESMUC)  
- Date Published: 2025  
- Format: Unknown
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs  
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Babel 46 is the third opera by Xavier Montsalvatge, which narrates the relationships established within a group of refugees of various nationalities – and which are expressed in different languages – while they await their repatriation after the Second World War.
“When composing Babel 46, at the same time that I did not think of departing too much from operatic conventionalisms, I wanted to avoid the influence that could derive from my preferences for the four great nationalist schools of opera: the Russian, so important ; the German one, full of philosophical speculations that I would not know how to assume; the French, less transendental, although of true projection, and the most emblematic one, the Italian. Fatally, however, the latter, for which I do not hide a special predilection, may have infiltrated more than one page of the score, making me run the risk that someone may consider it close to a deliberate “neo-verism”. The important point, however, is that in one or another way, the dramatic knot of the libretto is reflected with a certain realism, which highlights the contrast between a solidarity feigned by the characters during their forced internment which, at the time of freedom, turns out to be a pure lie, a fiction promoted by the singularity of the circumstances.”
Xavier Montsalvatge, 1996.