KISS

Description

"The Countess" is the composer's only opera about Warsaw and written in Warsaw, and the second he offered to the city after moving there. However, while "The Raftsman", composed a few months earlier, is a rustic painting—much appreciated by critics and the public—of the city's surroundings, on the banks of the Vistula, where Warsaw is presented idyllically by its theaters, its cultural life, its people, "The Countess", written a year later, is a rather perverse gift. Moniuszko and Wolski, his librettist, leave no doubt about the true face of the city, a rich metropolis, teeming with life (including cultural life, of course), but also a den of vanity, careerism, the launching of foreign fashions, and—to put it mildly—stupidity.