Moniuszko à Paris

A composer is given the chance of a lifetime to present a new opera in Paris, but he only has four weeks to complete it. Cracking under this terrible pressure, he gets tangled up in his own plot. Moniuszko à Paris, a ‘a playful melodrama, freely based on some facts’, is a comic opera inspired in part by the life of the composer Stanisław Moniuszko, the father of Polish opera, but also by bel canto and by the story of Don Quixote. The young Polish composer Andrzej Kwieciński draws on the idiom of the modernist avant-garde to develop a new bel canto style, while the librettist Krystian Lada gets inside the head of a composer in crisis for whom the line between reality and fiction is increasingly blurred. The French director Marc Lainé creates a mental space in which the composer Moniuszko ultimately merges with Don Quixote, the main character of his own opera.