The Portrait - The Pozna? Opera Theatre at Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa, Moniuszko Auditorium

The project is financed from a designated subsidy of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

According to many experts of new music in the Soviet Union, after Sergei Prokofiev's death, it was Mieczys?aw Weinberg who could be considered the most interesting composer after Dmitri Shostakovich. Apart from Alexandre Tansman and Andrzej Panufnik, Weinberg was one of the few Polish composers who, living in exile, managed to interest the most outstanding performers in his music. His compositions include several dozen symphonies, concerts, choral pieces, chamber pieces and movie scores (including for The Cranes Are Flying). In terms of the opera, he is the author of as many as seven pieces – The Passenger, to the libretto based on a short story by Zofia Posmysz, D’Artagnan in love with the libretto drawing on Alexandre Dumas’ novel, Well done! with the text inspired by a short story by Sholem Aleichem, and other pieces based on the works of Bernard Shaw, Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Nikolai Gogol.

It was actually Nikolai Gogol who wrote the story that inspired the libretto to The Portrait. The first performance of this opera was held in 1983 at the National Theatre in Brno. Other adaptations had not been attempted before the Bregenzer Festspiele (2010) directed by John Fulljames and the performances at the Nancy Opera and the North Theatre in Leeds directed by David Pountney – the same director who will now present his take on The Portrait in Pozna?.