In May this year we wrote about the announcement of the results of a competition for authors of a libretto and music for an opera based on Gregory Friday's book "The Best City in the World." We talk to Benjamin Bukowski - a playwright and theater director, one of the winners of the aforementioned contest - about the challenges faced by an author trying to translate a reportage into the form of an opera.
Wiktor Bochenek: What challenges does the attempt to translate a reportage into the form of an opera create for you?
Beniamin Bukowski: It's not only a completely different form requiring different means: necessarily, an opera, with its musical form, staging and literary abbreviation, constitutes a fully autonomous work. The question is: what is the essential element of Gregory Friday's book that would at the same time be inspiring as a starting point for an opera? There are an unusually large number of such tropes, thanks both to the author's literary proficiency and the subject itself. Paradoxically, then: it is the selection and reduction that seem to be the biggest challenge.
Wiktor: What does it look like to work on such a difficult, yet important topic for Varsovians and Varsovian women?
Benjamin: This is my first adventure with an opera libretto. Paradoxically, this makes the task a bit easier: I hope that the kind of disinclination associated with ignorance and unawareness of the rules will help produce something new and inspiring. In the first stage, it was primarily as thorough a search as possible: reading books, snooping in archives, looking at maps, recordings and photos, talking to specialists, in which, by the way, the organizers of the competition, headed by Jarek Trybus and Piotr Gruszczynski, are very helpful. The second stage is a conversation with the composer [Cezary Duchnowski - editor's note], after all, in opera the literary and musical layers live in close symbiosis, and there is even a hint that the literary layer is utilitarian and subservient to the musical one. As for the third stage, writing, please don't ask about it. I have no idea and don't intend to have one until I write the whole thing.
Beniamin Bukowski - Polish theater director, playwright and playwright responsible for writing the libretto for the opera based on the book "The Best City in the World" by Grzegorz Piątek.
photo: Sinfonia Varsovia service
Victor: What elements of the book do you intend to focus on?
Benjamin: For me, what is striking is the image of pre-war architects and urban planners calling for the non-functional Warsaw to be torn down and rebuilt as a super-modern capital. And that their dream after 1939, and especially during the ghetto uprising and the Warsaw Uprising, came true as a nightmare.
Individual biographies, anecdotes and images are of course interesting, but we are keen to universalize the themes in the book. A utopia that can never come true. And (literal) rebuilding from the rubble: a city becoming its own replica, a city where bricks and dust from razed quarters are used to erect new ones in their place; so that the memory of the past is inscribed in the fabric of Warsaw in a paradoxical way. Paradoxically, then, it is a paean to a city alive and having to be reborn again and again; a story of hope and community.
photos from the period of rebuilding Warsaw
photo by Alfred Funkiewicz | © Public domain
Wiktor: What points will the libretto focus on?
Benjamin: Our story falls into a dual framework. The narrower one is the second half of the 1940s: the period of the Capital Reconstruction Bureau. The broader one reaches back slightly to the past: to Warsaw before World War II and to the present, up to the question of the future functioning of cities.
We are still searching for the right balance between fictionality and abstraction. On the fictional side, there are certainly many images that appeal to the imagination: the crossing of residents from Prague to the left bank, the discussion of whether to rebuild Warsaw at all, the work of the BOS, the demolition of tenements in danger of collapse. There are also glimpses of numerous biographies. For me, however, the main axes marking the work on the opera are more abstract: the intersection of architecture, politics and human life. I would like to move along these three axes.
Wiktor: Jerzy Kornowicz, chairman of the composer's jury, said that a work was chosen that is a good balance between artistic and communicative values towards three, to some extent different audiences: Warsaw Autumn, the Grand Theater - National Opera and Sinfonia Varsovia. How do you try to connect these different audiences?
Benjamin: I think less by the category of the audience of specific institutions than by the idea of the target audience as such. My ambition is to create a work that is avant-garde, but at the same time communicative to a wide audience. I think that such a path is not only possible, but necessary - the subject, Cezary Duchnowski's work, the stage potential - all this directs us towards experimentation, courage of thought and searching for new means of expression. This does not mean that the effect is to be a hermetic creation, requiring in-depth knowledge of musicology, architecture, history to perceive. I believe that good art, especially art created in public institutions, is that which, without renouncing the freedom of expression, its ambitions and the importance of the subjects it takes up, is able to communicate with the community to which it is addressed. I prefer to think not of music lovers going to specific institutions, but free from this tribal framework. This is a text for people living in Warsaw, a confession of difficult love for the city; on the other hand, a universal tale of disaster and utopia, which should communicate with the more common human experience.
Photos from the period of Warsaw's reconstruction
© Public Domain
Wiktor: Have you thought about the set design yet?
Benjamin: This is a very distant perspective. The spatial and artistic vision of the show is being created in cooperation between the director and the set designer, and we don't yet know who these people will be. The author of the libretto and the composer can only have confident suggestions in this dimension. I myself believe in minimalism. And in the fact that for this opera there will be a need to find a completely new way of thinking about stage space, with the help of which it is possible to depict in an abstract way the complex urban tissue, its destruction, reconstruction and transformation. For me, the exhibition "Zgruzowstanie" at the Museum of the City of Warsaw and the shocking archival materials - surreal in perception photographs documenting the image of the destroyed capital right after it was abandoned by the German army - were certainly a big inspiration.
Wiktor: Thank you for the interview.
