“This story is for lonely children. Or children who will become so one day”

This is the dedication that Mohamed Rouabhi writes in his play Jérémy Fisher. A moving way to introduce the story of this boy, the son of a fishing family, born under the sign of Pisces, who, through a series of metamorphoses, transforms into a fish-boy, such that the time finally comes for him to go and live in the Ocean.

This is a chamber opera by the French composer Isabelle Aboulker (2007), who has dedicated much of her work to younger audiences, presented here in the Portuguese version by baritone Luís Rodrigues. Endowed with captivating simplicity, poetry, and depth, and with music of great beauty, this opera marks the beginning of the Público do Futuro [Future Audience] program, aimed at raising awareness of opera among young people and their families, starting with the premiere of an opera staged by choreographer Sílvia Real.

It encompasses a very powerful message about freedom and the price of being different, an initiation into life's vicissitudes and lurking opportunism, and about our growth, transformation, acceptance, and respect. It takes a great deal of love and intelligence on the part of the parents to accept him as he is – different from all other boys – and, even more so, to accept that they need to let him go, a metaphor for the transformation that we all undergo as we grow up, in which we cease to be children dependent on our parents and become adults who need to move on to their own lives. *

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* abstract included in the show’s brochure, OPERAFEST 2022