MEDIATHEK

"Operetta" is one of the most important works written over a period of 15 years by the renown contemporary Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz. For the very first time, the title comes to live on the opera stage. Michał Dobrzyński, a prominent artist of young Polish generation took on the challenging task of composing the music and constructing libretto with a mesmerizing result. His musical concept has been carefully brought to live under a demanding baton of Przemysław Fiugajski, a conductor, harpsichordist and playwright himself. Dobrzyński’s "Operetta" owes much of its success to the coherent and clever stage direction by Jerzy Lach, who has been the managing director of Warsaw Chamber Opera since 2012. His efforts were further supported by a renowned choreographer Jarosław Staniek and Jerzy Rudzki, stage and costume designer with extensive experience in working with Polish dramatic theatres. The operatic incarnation of Gombrowicz’s drama allows to portray the real tragedy of enslavement of a modern man. The marriage of grotesque and absurd transforms the initially trivial laughter into a laughter through pain. The work expresses destructive nature of modernity using an operetta language. The compositor’s intention was to create a parody from a parody, behind which a distorted image of the present emerges. The juxtaposition of muted minimalistic set design and flamboyant costumes leads the attention of viewers towards the characters stuck in limitations, but attempting to free themselves. “The world of the drama is built around an operetta which is understood as triviality, pretentiousness, mental emptiness, as opposed to history - full of pathos, horror and pain that refers to nakedness as a frail hope of men.” – says Jerzy Lach, the director.