Bestiari

An opera proposal that takes the medieval bestiaries as its starting point and gives musical form to real and fantastical creatures with symbolic meaning, drawing on new works by ten composers.

Bestiari brings together new works by ten composers: Benet Casablancas, Ferran Cuixent, Raquel García-Tomàs, Albert Guinovart, Ramon Humet, Joan Magrané, Marian Màrquez, Marc Migó, Hèctor Parra and Fabià Santcovsky. It is defined as a musical album built around these pieces and belongs to the opera genre.

The starting point is the medieval bestiaries, compilations that describe animals such as the lion, the elephant or the stag alongside marvellous beings such as the griffin, the basilisk and the phoenix. Rather than a catalogue, these texts aimed to reveal religious and moral truths through each creature, in a view of the world in which every being had a role within an interconnected whole.

The miniatures that illustrated these manuscripts, with their intense colours and detailed lines, turned that knowledge into images that accompanied the reading. The project draws on that outlook on nature and imagination, and is presented in the Foyer of the Liceu on the Rambla in Barcelona.