Maria of Buenos Aires

Tango opera in two parts Libretto: Horacio Ferrer Premiere: 8.05.1968, Sala Planeta, Buenos Aires Premiere of this production: 16.03.2023, TW-ON Original Spanish version with Polish subtitles

María de Buenos Aires is a New World, new music, tango nuevo and a new type of opera — tango operita, for which the musical basis is the crazy rhythm and mood of tango, a dance born on the southeast coast of Latin America. The folk tango argentino saw its bard, Astor Piazzolla, a compoet-poet, who created a new style of presentation of this passionate dance, drawing inspiration from Stravinsky, Bartók and classical musical forms, but also jazz and electronic rock — elevating tango to the rank of musical art.

He came from the vicinity of Buenos Aires, from Mar del Plata, a few hundred kilometers from the capital of Argentina. In 1925, he moved with his family to New York, where he learned to play the bandoneon. In 1934, he starred alongside the singer Carlos Gardel in the important film El día que me quieres, important for the history of tango. Returning to the country, he played the bandoneon in orchestras in Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires. Then there was an important turning point in his life — he started composing. After studying composition with Alberto Ginastera, he founded his own band, for which he began to write tango. The first prize in the composition competition for the Sinfonia Buenos Aires enabled him to go to Paris and continue his studies with Nadia Boulanger, a neoclassical musician who raised an entire generation of European composers. The 1960s and 1970s were a time for Astor Piazzolla to synthesize tango with jazz and rock, contact with the creative ferment of New York, to found more bands, of which Sextet performed and recorded until 1990. Piazzolla's nobility was the fact that since the late 1980s his compositions began to be incorporated into their repertoire by famous virtuosos, including violinist Gidon Kremer, pianist Emanuel Ax, cellists Yo-Yo-Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom the Argentinian dedicated Le Grand Tango.

María de Buenos Aires (1968) was the fulfillment of Piazzolla's artistic aspirations. He combined opera with dance, which was not new in the history of opera, but classical ballet replaced tango. The eponymous María was for the composer an allegory of the beloved city. A beautiful and cursed girl born “on the day when the Lord God lay drunk” breaks out of poverty and family pathology for the desired freedom. Seduced by the rhythm of tango, she plunges into the bowels of the big city, becomes a prostitute, learns what sex and crime are, in the end she herself is killed by a bunch of streetwalkers, gangsters and brothel matrons. María, however, gains a second life as her own shadow wandering the streets of the metropolis. María de Buenos Aires is directed by Wojciech Faruga, artistic director of the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz, previously head of the International Festival of Theatres for Children and Youth “Korczak”.

Bandoneon: Klaudiusz Baran, guitar: Andrzej Olewiński

Choir: Joanna Michalska, Maria Udovenko, Justyna Zanni, Marcin Maciak, Marek Kulik, Michał ZambrzyckDancers: Dominik Więcek, Wojciech Kałuża, Marek Bula, Bartłomiej Gąsior, Andrei Kamarov, Paweł Kozlowski

Orchestra of the Grand Theatre - National Opera

Assistant directors: Piotr Sędkowski, Marcel Osowicki