The Grand Theatre-National Opera began 2015 with one-time performances of two rarely heard but groundbreaking operas, presented by the Poznań Opera Theatre. The first was Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Portrait, with a libretto by Alexander Medvedev based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story, presented at the Moniuszko Auditorium on January 16. The performers of Poznań Opera Theatre were led by Maestro Gabriel Chmura and the opera was directed by David Pountney. The work was sung in Russian with Polish surtitles.
The Portrait a story of a poor artist who spends his last few pennies on a portrait at a flea market. Sometime later the figure in the portrait comes alive and begins to spit out money. It enables the artist to move up socially and gain respect of the society, but it comes at the expense of his life’s goals and artistic ideals.
According to many experts on music in the Soviet Union, after Sergei Prokofiev’s death, Mieczysław Weinberg was the most interesting composer after Dmitri Shostakovich. Apart from Alexander Tansman and Andrzej Panufnik, Weinberg was one of the few Polish composers whose music attracted top-notch performers. Unfortunately Weinberg, who emigrated to Moscow at the outset of World War II, was practically unknown anywhere outside the Soviet Union. Only now his music is being gradually rediscovered and programmed all around the world.
The other musically noteworthy presentation by the Poznań Grand Theatre company was their production of Krzysztof Meyer’s opera, Cyberiada (1967), staged at the Grand Theatre-National Opera in Warsaw on January 18. This comical opera in three acts received its Polish premiere in Poznań in May of 2013, a part of celebrations of Meyer’s 70th birthday. The libretto (ably written by the composer) is based on the writings of famous Polish science fiction author, Stanisław Lem. It is a tale of Trull, an engineer charged by Queen Genialina with building three machines, one for telling complicated tales, the other for conniving stories, and the last for deeply moving narrations. The outcome is a conclusion that the world can be saved only by wisdom and truth, not by money, deceit or the quest for perfection. The performance was directed by Ran Arthur Braun and the musical director was Krzysztof Słowiński.
Writing in Polityka after the Poznań premiere, Dorota Szwarcman praised the playful nature of the music that represented the best tradition of Polish sonorism of the 1960s. Although the work was written in the late 1960s, the world premiere was given only in 1986 in Wuppertal, Germany. The Polish premiere had to wait until 2013 and a performance in Warsaw until earlier this year. Asked by Stefan Drajewski whether anything was changed or updated in the score since it was written, Krzysztof Meyer replied, “No. This is an opera from my youth and that’s how I wrote at that time. I’m afraid that now I could have only ruined it.” The very colorful manuscript of Cyberiada (pictured below) is held in the Manuscript Collection of the Polish Music Center at USC.
[Sources: teatrwielki.pl, teatrwielki.pl, polityka.pl]