The poem in question is The Manger, written by the Catalan Joan Alavedra for his young daughter after she asked him about the characters in her toy Nativity scene. Besides being a poet Alavedra was also a journalist and politician, imprisoned in the 1930s for his role in declaring Catalonian independence. After his release (when The Manger was written) and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the family fled across the Pyrenees to Catalan France. Meanwhile, the celebrated cellist and pro-Republican Pablo Casals, by this time in his early 60s, was struggling to continue making music in Spain until 1938 when he left vowing never to return while the dictator General Franco was in power. Casals died aged 96 in 1973, two years before Franco.

But The Manger survives as an oratorio, with Alavedra’s words set to music by his friend and fellow exile Casals. It is regularly performed around the world as a large-scale hymn to peace – initially at the United Nations in 1960 as a warning by Casals about the looming prospect of nuclear war. The performance in New York was an exception to Casal’s iron rule that he would never let The Manger be performed in countries (including the US and the UK) that recognised Spain’s fascist government.

A POEM IN EXILE is a well-constructed mosaic, mixing footage from each decade of The Manger‘s existence with reconstruction (actors playing the young Casals and Alavedra), interviews with surviving family members and excerpts from The Manger performed in often spectacular surroundings. That such an initially simple and childish piece of work should, after its traumatic adolescence, take on the status of an international symbol of humanity, demands and gets a suitably sophisticated approach that never settles into a routine narrative.

… the von Trapp style escape of the Alavedra family is a movie in itself, given the less happy consequences …

In fact the story is almost too rich for its 77-minute running time, and an extra quarter of an hour wouldn’t have gone amiss: the von Trapp style escape of the Alavedra family is a movie in itself, given the less happy consequences. Once across the Pyrenees, the family was separated along with the other refugees and herded into what amounted to prison camps. Reunited with Pablo Casals in Paris, they moved back to Prades in French Catalonia, to be as close to home as possible.
Casals continued to perform there, and in unoccupied parts of Europe during World War 2 and in the 1950s moved to Puerto Rico where the story is taken up by Casals’ third wife Marta, his former cello student who married him when he was eighty (and she was twenty). Tantalising, but only sketched in, as is Casals’ continuing humanitarian work on behalf of his beloved country, culminating in his “I am a Catalan” speech before the United Nations in 1971 when he received the UN Peace Medal, which brought his own homage to Catalonia to a fitting conclusion.

But in the end, A POEM IN EXILE is about the music of The Manger – ably described in the film and interpreted by the soprano and fellow Catalan Montserrat Caballe – and in its performance fulfilling Casals’ desire that music should “reach out to the whole world”.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvZpZ24r5sI