Moniuszko was a descendant of a noble family. His father Czesław and his uncle Ignacy served in Napoleon’s army. Other uncles were accomplished scholars: Kazimierz was a lawyer (and an amateur botanist) and Aleksander studied classical philology. His uncle Dominik Moniuszko was, if you could call it that, a social experimenter – he divided his estate among the group of peasants that had worked on it, giving every one of them a plot of land, and built village schools he later financed on his own. This was all frowned upon by his peers and he did not find anybody willing to follow in his footsteps. He died in 1846, 16 years before the abolition of serfdom in the Kingdom of Poland.
In a way, Stanisław Moniuszko resembled his uncle Dominik the most, at least when it comes to breaking social norms. At the beginning of his career, he worked as an organist in a Vilnius church. The nobility considered this a burgher profession, unworthy of their stature, especially since church organ players were rarely virtuosos and Moniuszko had just graduated from his studies in Prussia. He also gave piano classes and worked with amateur singing groups. These activities influenced his later life quite a lot. He left us many pieces of organ music and the first performance of Halka (or at least its shorter, two-act version, called the Vilnius version) was prepared by his half-amateur musical friends.
After he moved to Warsaw, he got hired as the director (which basically meant the conductor) of the Wielki Theatre. Life in Warsaw was not easy for him, as the city’s intelligentsia considered him as a composer from the faraway Lithuania, the periphery of the country. The support of local patrons of the arts was indispensable for him.
Where (outside of Poland) were his operas performed?
Before his death in 1872, Moniuszko had his operas (or Halka, to be exact) performed in Bratislava, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The global popularity of his works (Halka and The Haunted Manor) was due to Maria Fołtyn, who was an opera singer until 1974 when she became a director after she lost her voice. It all started with the performance of Halka in Havana. After that, Fołtyn travelled with Moniuszko’s operas to the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Her productions most often employed local singers dressed in Polish folk costumes.
Fołtyn’s story inspired Cezary Tomaszewski’s staging of Halka during the Opera Rara Festival in Kraków in 2017, while her travels with Moniuszko’s work convinced Paweł Passini to stage the opera in Cazale on Haiti, a village inhabited by the descendants of Polish legionaries brought there by Napoleon to suppress the uprising of the local people.