De Profundis - musical monodrama by Andrzej Chyra / premiere - NOSPR

“The world does not have any meaning. One must give it a meaning of one’s own. Make a sacrifice.” – says the main character of the prison drama Symmetry, directed by Konrad Niewolski. Would Frederic Rzewski, a master of minimalism and socially engaged experimental music who passed away recently, agree with the above sentence, uttered by Dawid, an intellectual and university lecturer serving a long-term sentence? Certainly, such a thought was not alien to Oscar Wilde, whose De Profundis – a confessional letter bearing witness to his time at a 19th-century penitentiary to which he was sentenced for sexual practices that were illicit at the time – became the basis for one of the most important pieces by the American composer.  

The experience of loss of freedom – existential, political, but also that understood most literally – was one of the key topics in Rzewski’s oeuvre. The motif also returns in the pieces Coming Together and Attica, based on reports from witnesses and participants of the Attica prison rebellion, as laconic as they were shocking.

Three compositions and three very different texts came together in Andrzej Chyra’s imagination to form a specific type of opera, or rather a musical monodrama. Emotionally and dramaturgically opulent, the mosaic of romantic lyricism and sharp irony, the concreteness of everyday life and religious zeal, the relief to be found in artistic expression and bitter silence, will move not only connoisseurs of contemporary music, but also theatre, cinema and literature aficionados who seek answers to the most important of questions.

Enjoy this production by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, in which we search for answers to contemporary dilemmas in an innovative show somewhere in the borderlands of contemporary concert, dramatic theatre and opera.

Michał Mendyk