The premiere of Stanisław Moniuszko’s work based on Włodzimierz Wolski’s libretto marks the symbolic birth of Polish national opera. The history of the work’s creation, however, is linked to issues beyond music itself, for it corresponds to social unrest, the eruption of which was the Galician Peasant Uprising.
In February 1846, less than three years after the Minsk premiere of the operetta Loteria (The Lottery), which was being prepared for the Warsaw stage, Moniuszko announced his arrival in the city in a letter to the critic Józef Sikorski. He wrote, among other things: 'For my stay in Warsaw, I would very much like to prepare any sample of my strengths in the genre of dramatic music, even if it is to be a melodrama, as long as it’s not shallow. Here, in Vilnius, I have no one capable of writing librettos.'
A few days later, local newspapers reported on the outbreak of the Galician riots: the sacking and destruction of over five hundred manor houses, particularly in the Tarnów district, where almost all the nobility’s residences went up in smoke; the siege of Limanowa and Grybów by armed peasant groups; the ruthless slaughter of several thousand landowners and officials.
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Stanisław Moniuszko, drawing by K. Pillati, photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Moniuszko and his wife came to Warsaw at the end of August. For the first time he came face to face with Sikorski, with whom he had already incurred a debt of gratitude. It was Sikorski who intervened with Tomasz Napoleon Nidecki, then co-director (together with Karol Kurpiński) of the Teatr Wielki (The Grand Theatre), persuading him to stage Loteria – which was quite an honour for Moniuszko, as the same season included the premieres of Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment and Don Pasquale. In September 1846, Sikorski fulfilled another request from the composer and helped him find someone ‘capable of writing librettos’ – namely, Włodzimierz Wolski, an eccentric poet associated with Warsaw’s bohemia. Moniuszko’s meeting with Wolski took place in the salon of Wacław and Magdalena Łuszczewski – the director of the Department of Industry and Crafts at the Internal Affairs Committee of the Kingdom of Poland and the granddaughter of a Napoleonic army general.
Wolski had a troublesome poem in his drawer, which found neither recognition in the eyes of Warsaw poets nor compassion on the part of tsarist censors. The future librettist of Halka wrote it as a supplement to Ojciec Hilary (Father Hillary), published in 1843, whose protagonist, the unfortunate peasant Daniło, fell in love with Zosia, a noble maiden of the court – with a predictable outcome. The poem Halszka reversed this pattern in some measure, with what was provocative bravado for those times. This time it was a nobleman who developed feelings for a common girl. Janusz married Halszka secretly, then left her in the village with his newborn daughter, while he himself enlisted in Dąbrowski’s Legions. Upon his return, it came to light that his mother had ordered the hajduks to strip the peasant girl naked and then bludgeon her and the child to death. Janusz lost his mind, killed his mother and committed suicide.
The Censorship Committee did allow Halszka to be printed, but in such a mutilated form that Wolski abandoned publication. This was even before the outbreak of the Galician uprising, which was later raised as the crowning argument that neither the poet nor the composer had any intention of smuggling any allusions to Jakub Szela’s uprising into the opera’s libretto. The problem was that when Wolski’s meeting with Moniuszko took place, the pain of the tragedy was still alive. Even Aleksander Walicki, the composer’s first biographer, wrote about it, resorting to the phrase that the opera was written ‘fresh after witnessing the events of 1846’. There are many indications that Wolski created Halszka as a gloomy foreshadowing of the peasant uprising, and Moniuszko – already after the defeat of the uprising – was aware enough of the social subtext contained in it to push it under the surface of the narrative when working on the libretto.
The poem Halszka was undoubtedly burdened with the sin of literary youthfulness. Wolski blithely copied Romantic models, sometimes verging on the ridiculous. In the text, there is a sky ‘wreathed in grey clouds’, there is the ‘crepe of despair’ and a ‘blood-gold moon’. Interestingly, none of these disjointed stylistic figures found their way into later versions of the Halka libretto. On the other hand, truly excellent fragments did not make it into the work either – as if both creators realised they had to satisfy the tastes of the audiences of the time, while at the same time not upsetting the censors or offending the noble elite, for whom the peasant uprising had effectively ruined any dreams of further struggles for independence.
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‘Halka’, directed by Mariusz Treliński, photo: Krzysztof Bieliński / Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa
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In February 1847, the Vilnius censors allowed the libretto of the first version of Halka to be printed. Moniuszko wrote to Sikorski that he was working
[…] on the score, and when it is finished, I will know what to do with it, because Nidecki already knows that I am a musician by profession. I ask you most solemnly to commend me to the memory of our mutual friends, as I believe I was very easily forgotten. [...] I shall await your judgements as to whether ‘Halka’ should go to the press or, on the contrary, end up in the furnace.
It did not end up in the furnace. In November, a two-act version of the opera appeared in print. On the first day of January 1848, it received its premiere through semi-professional means, in the Vilnius salons of the Müllers, the composer’s in-laws. The composer reported to Sikorski:
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When I had only seen my Halka in the score, I confess to you openly: I doubted some of the audacity I committed in it. […] However, after the mediocre performance of this magnificent masterpiece of mine, I await with a serene conscience the time when it will be appreciated. […] On your New Year’s Day, according to the plan already laid down in Warsaw, the performance of the music came to fruition – our kind-hearted musicians of the orchestra, church singers, several amateurs, over forty good people combined, so moved me, helping me until the end, their understanding of the work increasing with each rehearsal.
Bitterness shines through from Moniuszko’s letter. After the well-received Loteria, he expected the premiere to take place at the Grand Theatre. Yet it took ten years before the ‘Warsaw blighters’, as he bluntly put it at the beginning of the letter, decided to finally stage Halka. However, it was already a completely different opera – the one presented on New Year’s Day 1858 in Warsaw consisted not of two but of four acts and contained a number of fragments absent from the Vilnius Halka. What is more, these are pieces without which most music lovers of Halka cannot imagine the work, including ‘Mazur’ (Mazurka) and ‘Tańce góralskie’ (Highland Dances), as well as Jontek’s famous aria ‘Szumią jodły’ (The Firs Are Rustling) – in the two-act version, Jontek sang with a baritone and Moniuszko did not give him much room to show off. The Warsaw Halka undoubtedly gained musically but lost in dramatic compactness and in many respects turned out to be a less innovative work than the Vilnius version, which was devoid of show-off elements. If Moniuszko had not over-composed his debut opera, its message would be clearer to today’s audience: it was not meant to be a tearful story about an abused and abandoned ‘poor girl’ but a drastic story about ‘conflict between master and slave, nobleman and peasant’, as Hans von Bülow accurately put it, sharing his impressions after the Warsaw performance in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.
Reading the surviving fragments of Wolski’s Halka and the librettos of both versions of the opera leads to instructive conclusions. The Warsaw Halka is not a simple expansion of the Vilnius Halka. In the original version, Janusz sincerely loves the highlander girl, albeit with a love doomed to failure in the face of the norms of the nobility’s customs. Their child, who will be transformed into a symbol of the loss of virginity in the four-act version, really exists. The rather twisted metaphor of the bird of prey, which in the heroine’s final monologue in the Warsaw Halka – ‘feeds, cuddles and lulls her chicks’ – has replaced the bitch and puppies of the original version. The Vilnius Jontek is primarily driven by hatred of masters. The Vilnius Halka clearly went mad with despair and at the end does not forgive Janusz but blesses him.
The Warsaw premiere, however, proved to be a true triumph, and 1 January 1858 is still regarded today as the symbolic date of the birth of Polish national opera. The first cast included several singers who had contributed to the success of Loteria more than a decade earlier, including Paulina Rivoli, beloved by audiences, in the title role (she is said to have encored seventeen times at the first performance). The role of Janusz was played by Adam Ziółkowski, a pupil of Jan Quattrini, then director of the Grand Theatre. The tenor role of Jontek was created by Julian Dobrski, an excellent singer and superb actor, additionally shrouded in legend as a participant in the Spring of Nations in Italy, from which he returned to Warsaw only through the intercession of Maria Kalergis – patron of the arts, pianist and Norwid’s great, unfulfilled love. Quattrini himself conducted. The following day, Jan Kenig wrote in Gazeta Warszawska that ‘it is impossible to comprehend in one hearing a thing containing great treasures of beauty, finished and nuanced with truth, art and above all great talent.’
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Paulina Rivoli in costume from ‘Halka’, ‘Tygodnik Ilustrowany’, 1881, photo: Wikipedia
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During Moniuszko’s lifetime, Halka was staged in Warsaw one hundred and fifty times. By the end of the century, it had been performed five hundred times. It went on a world tour in 1868, starting in Prague. In 1905, it was first performed in Milan, in an Italian translation by Achille Bonoldi. The Warsaw version is ever present on the playbills of Polish theatres to this day. It has only occasionally been staged abroad after the war and has still not penetrated the opera mainstream – despite a musically excellent co-production between the Theater an der Wien and the Grand Theatre National Opera under the baton of Łukasz Borowicz (premiere in 2019 in Vienna), which was overshadowed by Mariusz Treliński’s staging, unintelligible to foreign audiences.
The two-act Halka from Vilnius has been unjustly forgotten. After the war, it was first performed by the Warsaw Chamber Opera in 1984 at the Brighton Festival, from which it later found its way to the company’s home stage. In 2010, it slipped through the Grand Theatre National Opera at several student performances of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, and nine years later it reached the small theatrical stage in a very interesting staging by Agnieszka Glińska. In 2024, it was successfully staged by the Polish Royal Opera, in Wojciech Adamczyk’s directorial approach. Still, this is too little to consider the original version to have established itself in the consciousness of music lovers.
Therefore, the opportunity to experience Halka as a European work – regardless of the version chosen – has yet to take place. But it is already clear that it is capable of enchanting – even those who have so far been made to believe that it is a banal and uninspired opera that is completely unsuited to our complicated times.
Written in Polish by Dorota Kozińska, last updated 29 May 2024
Translated by Patryk Grabowski
