Moniuszko a Paris is a comic opera inspired by the life of the composer Stanisław Moniuszko, the father of Polish opera, and by bel canto and by the story of Don Quixote. Moniuszko was given the chance of a lifetime to present a new opera in Paris, but with only four weeks to complete it, he cracks under this terrible pressure and gets tangled up in his own plot. The young Polish composer Andrzej Kwieciński draws on the idiom of the modernist avant-garde to develop a new bel canto style, while the librettist Krystian Lada gets inside the head of a composer in crisis for whom the line between reality and fiction is increasingly blurred. Commissioned by the Polish National Opera, the piece will be given its debut on at the 62nd Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music.