On Saturday evening the grand premiere of the musical-historical performance: Universa-Open Opera, celebrating the 650th Jubilee of the Jagiellonian University, was held on Kraków Main Market Square. The University commissioned a composer of international renown, Jan A. P. Kaczmarek, Academy Award winner, to create this symphonic piece of ambitious musical format – a modern concert-opera-morality play – which is a combination of high and mass culture. According to the composer himself, the word "open" is a direct reference to the form of the piece.

A very demanding and difficult role was played by Julia Pietrucha, who impersonated seven liberal arts: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music, in the context of which main protagonists: Queen Jadwiga, Nicholaus Copernicus and Albert Einstein were portrayed by distinguished opera soloists: Iwona Sobótka, Małgorzata Walewska and Szymon Komasa.

The borders of time and space were crossed in the opera: seemingly unrelated characters from different periods of time and various locations engaged in an intellectual-moral dialogue, the leitmotif of which were the seven liberal arts.

This enormous effort was led by Monika Wolińska, a distinguished conductor of the young generation, who has collaborated with numerous orchestras around the world. She is also the first Pole to have conducted in the famous New York Carnegie Hall.

After the performance, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek entered the stage himself, to greet the Jagiellonian University and the whole Poland.

fot. Anna Wojnar, Marek Welzel