Now largely forgotten, Ludwik Grossman was an important 19th century composer and a man actively involved in the musical life of his community. One can see interesting analogies between Grossman’s biography and that of Stanisław Moniuszko. Similarly to his older colleague, Grossman pilgrimaged to Warsaw to study and was taught by August Freyer, to continue his education in Berlin. Both composers took an interest in serious as well as comic opera: the text of Grossman’s first work for the stage, Rybak z Palermo (A Fisherman from Palermo) was written by Jan Chęciński, the librettist of Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor.
Ghost of the Governor was the composer’s second opera. In the wake of its triumphant world premiere in Warsaw, the work was successfully shown in Vienna, Kraków, Pest, St Petersburg, Lviv, Graz, Teplice, and Berlin. The opera owed its popularity less to the quality of the libretto – a rather convoluted intrigue conceived by Władysław Ludwik Anczyc – than to Grossman’s unpretentious score.
The story is set at a spa. Fékéte, the owner of a mountainous resort is trying to placate holidaymakers complaining about bad housing conditions. Their conversations is interrupted by the arrival of esteemed guests from Warsaw: a Councillor’s Wife, Helenka, and a Chairman. It is at this point that the love plot starts. The Councillor’s Wife, and Helenka’s aunt, tries to force the young woman to marry the Chairman. The niece objects the matrimony: she is in love with her former teacher, Leon, who also unexpectedly turns up at the resort. The Chairman is not thrilled by the idea either: there is another prospective bride he has his eyes on. Will there be a happy ending? To find out, you need to follow a serpentine story involving the resort owner, a physician he employs, Hungarian guests, soldiers led by a Czech commander, and not one, but two ghosts of a Governor haunting a nearby castle.
Grossman’s score has an undeniable charm to it. Ghost of the Governor can be characterised as an Italian opera buffa featuring elements of vaudeville and operetta, and some French influences (the motif of disguising oneself as a ghost appeared in François-Adriena Boieldieu’s immensely popular The White Lady). The score’s biggest merits are its lightness and diversified form. It features chorus scenes, arias, a cavatina, couplets, a ballade, ariosos and ensembles that aptly illustrate the lyrical, comical and dance-like aspects of the circumstances devised by Anczyc in the libretto. What is more, the composer had the original idea to weave into the music fabric of the opera elements of Polish, Czech and Hungarian national music (an instrumental czardasz and the mazurka Ptaszku luby, skowroneczku were the most appreciated fragments of the score).
This semi-staged performance led by Marta Kluczyńska, a conductor on a mission to rediscover forgotten operas, and fearless stage director Vezary Tomaszewski is a chance to see if the most famous Polish comic opera, Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor – is not perhaps facing a new spectral competitor in the form of Grossman’s Ghost of the Governor.
