Paderewski’s ‘Manru’ premieres at Warsaw's National Opera

Directed by Marek Weiss, the production features Slovak tenor Peter Berger in the title role alongside Polish soprano Ewa Tracz as Ulana, with Grzegorz Nowak on the conductor’s podium.

The libretto by Alfred Nossig is based on Chata za wsią (The Cottage Outside the Village), a 19th-century novel by Polish writer Ignacy Jan Kraszewski. It exploits the frequent operatic motif of a love potion to tell the story of a marriage doomed to end tragically.

Manru had its world premiere on May 29, 1901 in Dresden, arousing enormous interest among both critics and audiences. In later years, the opera was performed across Europe—in Lviv, Prague, Zurich, Nice, Monte Carlo, Bonn, Warsaw and Kiev—as well as in America, where it wowed viewers in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and New York.

Manru remains to this day the only Polish work to have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The new Warsaw production is a joint project with the Grand Opera Theatre in the western Polish city of Poznań, where it will open in mid-December.

Manru will be staged in Kraków, in Poland’s south, next month.

At the beginning of 2019, the new production of Manru will be made available to opera lovers worldwide as live streaming via vod.teatrwielki.pl and theoperaplatform.eu.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski was a celebrated Polish pianist, composer and statesman who played a key role in his country recovering its sovereignty a century ago.

(mk/gs)