An opera about Warsaw

The main character of the opera is Warsaw - destroyed and rebuilt, seen through the eyes of two women: an architect of the Capital Reconstruction Bureau and an American journalist.

Rebuilding of the Capital and an American journalist. The author of the libretto modelled them on the characters of Helena Syrkusowa (1900-1982), Secretary General of the General Council for Rebuilding Warsaw, and Anne Louise Strong (1885-1970), an American reporter captivated by communism, who observed the retreat of the Nazis from occupied Poland and reported on the beginning of the country's reconstruction, drawn into the orbit of the Soviet Union.

Following a closed competition, the project board entrusted the task of preparing the staging to director Barbara Wisniewska. She is a graduate in directing from the Warsaw Theatre Academy and currently a lecturer at the Academy.currently a lecturer there. She has gained experience working alongside such artists as Katie Mitchell, Christopher Alden and Ushio Amagatsu. Since 2012, she has been working with Mariusz Treliński as an assistant and director of revivals of his productions at the Grand Theatre - National Opera, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Theater an der Wien or Narodní Divadlo Státní Opera.

"Modern Warsaw is a city that has covered a living wound with a thin layer of rubble and new buildings, pulsating wound,’ the director states in the competition draft. "Underneath flows lava, oiltransformed from the bodies of the fallen and those lost in the cellars from which they never managed to escape, the executed and the forgotten.