Biography
Stanisław Moniuszko was born in 1819 in Ubiel, near Minsk in what is now Belarus, and studied composition and choral conducting from 1837 to 1839 at the Berlin Singakademie under Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen. From 1840 he worked as a church organist in Vilnius, where he composed, among other things, the first version of his opera Halka. In 1858 he became conductor of the Polish national opera at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw, where the expanded version of Halka became his breakthrough and where, over the following fifteen years, he wrote almost exclusively his own operas, including The Haunted Manor, Flis and Paria. From 1864 he also taught at the Warsaw Institute of Music and compiled the multi-volume song collection Śpiewnik domowy, a staple of domestic Polish music-making. Moniuszko died in Warsaw in 1872; his funeral became a public demonstration of mourning, and he is still regarded as the father of Polish national opera.
On Stagelog
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