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Opera lessons Recitative, Aria, Bel Canto given by our artists are truly the inside scoop. Can you imagine have better teachers? After all, who knows more about opera than those who experience it on a daily basis? Our artists will be the ones to introduce you to, and even demonstrate, the basics of opera terminology. You will also explore the history of opera, a unique genre that combines words, music, visual arts, movement, gesture, and acting. The artists/instructors will also share with you their own experiences from the opera stage. Each class is an opportunity to listen to a short live recital performed by an opera soloist.

Opera Sound Hunters is an educational game for children designed to help them get acquainted with the magical atmosphere of opera with the help of sounds produced by musical instruments and human voices. Playing children get to know that different musical instruments that make up a symphony orchestra and learn to distinguish between different human voices.

What ingredients do you need to create a piece of music? What genre and style can you prepare it? Will you need a form for that? How do you serve dynamics and agogics? What are the vocal capabilities of a tenor and how low can the tuba play? You will get answers to these and other questions during this series of concerts. Note, however, that you will do more than listening!

Meetings that develop the musical, dance and visual imagination of children 7+ through activities they can enjoy together with their parents, helping reveal talent and showing that the coexistence of different arts is possible, and so are ties between generations.

Under the guidance of the instructor, the children will learn basic rhythmic values, play percussion instruments and form an orchestra to perform melodic pieces. During the course of the class, the children will also listen and watch music recordings of some of the most beautiful works of music, getting to know the sound of the instruments that make up a symphony orchestra.

Children's favourite story told through music and dance. Come and join us for a family-friendly ballet production of Cinderella presented on the small stage of the Polish National Opera. Choreographed by Antonio Lanzo, the show is performed by the students of the Warsaw Ballet School.

Ariadne on Naxos was the third opera written by Richard Strauss together with librettist Hugon von Hoffmansthal. Their collaboration had started with the expressionist Elektra, followed two years later by a drastically different, Mozartian Der Rosenkavalier. Their next project drew heavily on literary inspirations. The one-act opera was meant to be shown at the end of Molièr’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which Hoffmansthal had just translated into German. The version of Ariadne that prevailed to our times has a prologue setting the metatheatrical stage for the opera.

Holoubek's voice was like music; he was known for the virtuosity with which he spoke Polish and was one of the first winners of the Master of Polish Language title. His Great Improvisation from Mickewicz's Forefathers' Eve was treated by contemporary theatre directors as an undisputed standard of stage monologue. An outstanding actor, he was also an intellectual par excellence, which does not often go hand in hand these days. Raised in a family that cherished music ('My father was absolutely mad about opera; he'd buy opera recordings which I'd listen to since early childhood... I know at least a dozen operas by heart and can hum them, if I want.'). At drama school, he met Artur Malawski, a solfège teacher, who'd take students to music concerts. Holoubek grew to admire baroque polyphony because of its formal discipline and a certain timelessness: 'The music stops, but I can still hear it play.' He was less fond of romantic music, as listening to it he would 'stop listening to the music and start admiring the craft of the composer'. Contemporary music was the most challenging to him, but would make an exception for composers whose works 'displayed clear signs of genius'. These included his personal friend Witold Lutosławski, whom Holoubek visited in his 'soundproofed study where you could hear your own bronchitis.' To celebrate the great actor's memory, each year the Teatr Wielki holds a concert featuring his favorite music.

'We came to the conclusion that a choreographic workshop should be an integral part of a ballet company’s life if the company harbours the ambition to carve out an original artistic style for itself. Without attempts to find new paths, fresh means of expression and even a new language, ballet would be a mildly unexciting art, offering little surprise or challenge to its audience. Perhaps it would be a dead art.

Now largely forgotten, Ludwik Grossman was an important 19th century composer and a man actively involved in the musical life of his community. One can see interesting analogies between Grossman’s biography and that of Stanisław Moniuszko. Similarly to his older colleague, Grossman pilgrimaged to Warsaw to study and was taught by August Freyer, to continue his education in Berlin. Both composers took an interest in serious as well as comic opera: the text of Grossman’s first work for the stage, Rybak z Palermo (A Fisherman from Palermo) was written by Jan Chęciński, the librettist of Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor.