Świat oper Zygmunta Krauzego

Zygmunt Krauze belongs to the most important Polish composers of the older generation. His significant artistic achievements have for a half-century drawn the attention of audiences, critics, and musicologists, who focused primarily on his concept of musical unism, inspired by the visual unism of painter Władysław Strzemiński.

In the last fifteen years, Krauze has been particularly fascinated by opera. Although he had addressed the genre earlier (The Star, 1981), it was only in this century that he became more active in the field: between 2001 and 2015, he composed five successive operas. The idea of this book was born spontaneously in spring 2015, when the Senate and authorities of the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź awarded Prof. Zygmunt Krauze with an honorary doctorate. Soon after, lecturers of the Theory of Music Department of that academy came up with the idea to honour the occasion with a monograph of Krauze’s opera works.

The World of Zygmunt Krauze’s Operas presents the composer’s music from two perspectives. The book’s first part, titled Syntheses: The operatic work of Zygmunt Krauze, contains through analyses of the various aspects of Krauze’s opera output, treating his six operas as a block, a specific opus magnum of his music theatre. Here, the reader gains insights into Krauze’s overall aesthetics. The second part, Analyses: The operatic works of Zygmunt Krauze, features six articles, each dedicated to a single work. Those interested in specific operas by Krauze may use this part of the book as a guide to listening, written with academic rigour and addressing each work from a single scholar’s perspective.