It took twenty years to rebuild the Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera after the ravages of World War II. The venue’s solemn reopening in 1965 was a momentous event for the city of Warsaw. It demonstrated not only the scale of destruction, but also the determination to raise the city from the ashes. In 2025, the Teatr Wielki stages the world premiere of an opera about rebuilding Warsaw, marking the eightieth anniversary of the start of that painstaking process.

The spectacle has been inspired by Grzegorz Piątek’s book Najlepsze miasto świata. Warszawa w odbudowie 1944–1949 [The Best City in the World: Warsaw Under Reconstruction 1944–49]. This publication offers a panoramic overview of that unique endeavour that brought people together, regardless of their worldview and in defiance of wartime destruction. The opera’s libretto by Beniamin Bukowski quotes period sources such as political speeches, urban planners’ technical jargon, but also the colloquial language of Warsaw’s streets. Far from being a historical chronicle, the spectacle is a tale of interwoven, complicated human lives. There are two women protagonists. One is a modernist architect (modelled on Helena Syrkus) working for the Warsaw Reconstruction Office, whose prewar dream of rebuilding the dysfunctional city has become a macabre reality. The other is a US journalist (demonstrating some traits of the communist enthusiast Anne Louise Strong), are porter who travels with the Red Army across war-ravaged Poland. Their meeting will lead both of them to revise their worldview.

The music, composed by Cezary Duchnowski, combines orchestral grandeur with state-of-the-art electronics, as well as solos with choral parts, allowing it to portray both the enormity of the city’s tragic fate and the individual perspectives of its inhabitants. To the spectacle’s director Barbara Wiśniewska, a Warsaw native, this opera has a personal dimension as it reflects the fates of her own family as well. At the same time, she takes a keen interest in the broad material and social dimension of the city’s destruction and its rebuilding process. This traumatic experience affected several generations but was transformed into a joint effort and, thanks to people’s determination, became a historically unparallelled example of a country’s capital rising from the rubble after being levelled to the ground.

The Opera about Warsaw not only recounts tragic and glorious chapters from the city’s past, but also in a very contemporary manner tells about the life of a metropolis suspended and torn between architects’ urban planning, politicians’ ideological stance, and its inhabitants’ actual needs and dreams.

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Written for the Sinfonia Varsovia orchestra as an homage to Warsaw, this opera also carries the message that the places and values we abandon and destroy, reduced to rubble by our own hands, may not be irreversibly lost after all.

Building and rebuilding as acts of conscious restoration, as the choice of responsibility and hope, have provided this music with its subject and inner force, with the motion that carries it on, its breath and direction.

The Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera is Warsaw’s Vatican, a city within the city. Its rhythm and internal logic, the community of roles and tensions, the breaths and noises, tremors and pulsations of the stage – all this imbues the music and becomes its own substance and tissue.
Not as an effect, but as the structure.
Not as background, but as the very core.

The other force is that of an encounter, which is not merely a presence but a transformation of oneself and that other person in a relation. Not as a state of existing side by side but as being towards and in relation to each other. It is that encounter that gives rise to sense and ethics. Neutral in itself, the encounter is a space of possibilities that may bring both understanding and violence, both community and exclusion.

It is a not unfamiliar, but still not familiarised event – a meeting of the protagonists and the authors, who use different languages to tell one story.

The opera is thus a Community Reconstruction Office.

Cezary Duchnowski