Verdi's last work, in the popular tradition, is a lighthearted comedy about a fat drunkard who cynically seduces two women and is severely punished by them. However, when one carefully examines the Shakespearean original and carefully analyzes the extraordinary richness of the musical motifs, one discovers a darker undercurrent to this mysterious work, which the aged, accomplished composer consciously wrote as a farewell to his immense legacy, his own impressive life, and the world he philosophically viewed as the creator's painful joke on people and their actions. Reaching this undercurrent and revealing its supreme artistic beauty seems worth departing from the stereotype of a protagonist supposedly engaged solely in enjoying the remnants of the pleasures of table and bed, and in fairground clowning.

Falstaff

Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera

Nearly two hundred people on stage, live horses, a grand set, and lavish costumes – Mark Weiss's Nabucco is a total spectacle, a true synthesis of the arts. "Opera isn't made like that anymore" – all the more reason to see it. It's a historical production in the strict sense – as a staple of the National Opera, in the repertoire since 1992, but also because the director consciously crafted his project as if Verdi's contemporaries had done it, emphasizing monumentality and additional, almost circus-like attractions. Musically, this early Verdi work is atypical, somewhere between an opera and an oratorio, because the real protagonist is the chorus. Its constant presence is crowned by " Va pensiero," the most famous choral aria in history, audible and overwhelming here, all the more so because it's sung against the backdrop of the lowered Iron Curtain (the Wailing Wall is projected onto it), which amplifies and echoes the sounds. The director himself intended his work as a pastiche of 19th-century opera, which justifies the clash of "high and low" – Nebuchadnezzar's horse-drawn aria, as tradition would have it, often sends shivers not only through the audience but also through the animal itself, which, so to speak, releases its tension, and the desert scenery is enriched with yet another prop, from a distance resembling small hamada stones.

Nabucco

Dead End is a singular work: an opera exploring current issues, written by two prominent Polish artists, Krzysztof Meyer and Antoni Libera.

Krzysztof Meyer is considered one of the most prominent present-day composers. He was a noteworthy student of Krzysztof Penderecki, then a pupil of Nadia Boulanger and Witold Lutosławski, and finally, a professor of composition of the Cologne University of Music, now retired. As an eminent expert on Shostakovich, he penned a monograph on the composer and composed the third act of The Gamblers. A composer of mainly large-scale symphonic pieces and chamber music, he also wrote a youthful opera after Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad. The composer has a number of prestigious awards to his name.

Dead End

Verdi’s final work is commonly perceived as a joyful comedy about a fat boozer who cynically seduces two women and gets severely punished for it. Only once you read into the Shakespearian original and carefully analyse the extraordinary richness of the opera’s musical motifs, you get to the bottom of the mysterious work, consciously written by the aged composer as a farewell to his momentous oeuvre, impressive life, and the mortal world, which he ironically summed up as the Creator’s painful joke played on humans and their endeavours.

Marek Weiss

Events

Upcoming events

Nov 27 - Dec 27, 2026

Falstaff · Polish National Opera

Past events

17 - 26 Apr, 2026

Falstaff · Polish National Opera

25 - 31 Oct, 2025

Nabucco · Polish National Opera

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