BIO

Stage director and artistic director of the Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera. In his productions he combines the beauty of classical music with contemporary interpretation and modern aesthetics. He brings the emotions recorded in the libretto into the contemporary world – disturbing, symbolic, without any easy answers. His productions have been shown to the most demanding audiences, from Berlin, Paris, Brussels, to Los Angeles, Washington, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, and Muscat in Oman.

Treliński graduated from the film directing faculty of the famous Łódź Film School. His television debut was Zad Wielkiego Wieloryba; acclaimed by critics, it became a manifesto of the ‘children of martial law’ generation.

Treliński’s opera debut came in 1996 when the Warsaw Autumn Festival commissioned him to direct Elżbieta Sikora’s one-act Heartsnatcher based on the prose of Boris Vian, subsequently staged at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Mariusz Treliński has made opera more attuned to modernity: he has revived the classical genre by blending it with current aesthetic trends, lending it some of the dynamism and temperature of our times. ‘All of my productions are connected with things that happen in my life, directly or spiritually’, he says. ‘I want opera theatre to be like other arts – a simple person-to-person conversation’. Even though he has called himself a film director who ended up in opera by accident, it seems that the contemporary opera scene cannot exist without him.