The story of Luis de Pablo and Vicente Molina Foix is one of an intense friendship and a passionate musico-literary collaboration which bears its fruits for the third time with El abrecartas. The first two operatic projects –El viajero indiscreto (1990) and La madre invita a comer (1992) were librettos based on original ideas suggested and developed by the novelist from Elche (Alicante). El abrecartas, on the other hand, was initiated by Luis de Pablo, who at the end of 2010 expressed an interest in transforming Molina Foix’s homonymous novel into a new - and his “last” - opera. 

The  task of compacting this dense choral novel  into a libretto -  Molina Foix says it is the “most difficult task of my life”  -  where nearly a century of Spanish history  is interlaced  with the private stories of  a group of losers, pleasure-seekers  and survivors took its definitive direction when Luis de Pablo suggested  restricting his opera to the first half of the novel. In this way, El abrecartas starts at the beginning of the 20th century with a children’s chorus in a small village of the province of Granada. It concludes some 200 pages later in the novel and fifty years later in a duo a capella between a very relevant person of our literature and the invented co-protagonist in this story of loss, exile and deep-felt passion. 

Live transmission available only in Spain