Tránsito

Ópera de Tenerife presents Tránsito, with the music and libretto of Jesús Torres. Based on Max Aub’s work, Tránsito explores the pain, alienation, and moral dilemmas of Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico. In 2025, the opera Tránsito won the award for best new contemporary lyric production at the seventh edition of the Premios Ópera XXI awards.

In Tránsito, the characters walk among the absences of people who are gone, of words left unsaid, and of things lost forever. Memory puts strain on relationships; silences and wounds are passed down. The pain is not just individual; it is a shared grief that no one knows how to overcome. Like in many societies shaped by war, dictatorship, or violence that is rarely spoken about, the past lingers in glances, gestures, and bodies. The opera places us in a space where what is not said feels like an abyss.

When many former combatants and Spanish Republican exiles still had hope that Allied forces in the Second World War would put an end to the Franco regime, Max Aub envisioned time grinding to a halt as it did with the eventual condemnation of them all in a labyrinth of opposing loyalties, heartbreak and political and personal disappointments.

The one-act play Tránsito, written in 1944 and set on a night of twilight sleep in 1947 in the Mexican exile, is an ethical testimony to that historic moment and the literary basis of this one-act chamber opera divided into 12 ‘moments’ composed by Zaragoza-born Jesús Torres. The winner of the 2012 National Music Award, his operatic debut is backed by a solid artistic career of over three decades, an autonomous and versatile voice that, over time, has experimented with growing freedom, intensity, and emotion, and an impassioned association with Castilian poetry that is evident throughout his musical output. From the first bars of the orchestral prologue, the music is dense and complex, reflecting the unsettling script of Max Aub.

This opera will be performed in Spanish with Spanish and English overtitles.