What a discovery! We knew what a world-renowned piano virtuoso Ignace Paderewski had been more than a century ago. It was also known that he had been an actor of the independence of Poland and prime minister of his country after the war of 14, he who, as a child, had seen his father arrested by the Russians. We even knew that he had composed, but we must admit that we had never heard a note from his opera, Manru, premiered in 1901. It is this score that reveals the Opera of Nancy, city that welcomed a king of Poland in exile...
Manru had great success when it premiered in 1901 in Dresden, four years before Salome, and with the future creator of the title role in Elektra as the female performer. Did these triumphs of Richard Strauss accelerate the eclipse of opera composer Paderewski? Certainly, there are clumsiness in this lyrical drama in German, where a villager cuts herself off from her family by living her love for a freedom-loving gypsy, and rejected by the community. The libretto overdevelops...
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