Halka is an opera by Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko to a libretto written by Włodzimierz Wolski, a young Warsaw poet with radical social views. It is part of the canon of Polish national operas. Performance history The first performance of the two-act version was in a concert performance in Vilnius on 1 January 1848. The staged premiere took place in the same city on 28 February 1854. A four-act version was performed in Warsaw on 1 January 1858. The opera was subsequently produced in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Russia and Cuba. More recently, in June 2004 the Opera has been staged in Kraków Zakrzówek Nature Park as an outdoor performance with horses, fireworks, special effects, and attendance exceeding 6,000 viewers. It was produced by Krzysztof Jasiński under the musical direction of Wojciech Michniewski, with the ballet and orchestra of the Opera Krakowska and with Ewa Biegas and Maria Mitrosz alternating in the title role. The Opera has been produced again on stage of the Kraków Opera in December 2011 (performed till February 2012) with sopranos Magdalena Barylak, Ewa Biegas, and Ewa Vesin, as well as Mariusz Kwiecien, soloist of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The first performance of Halka in Britain was at POSK in London (the Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith) on the 30th of October 2009 by Heritage Opera with Serenna Wagner in the title role of Halka and piano accompaniment by Paul Greenhalgh. In 2010 a new English translation by Donald Pippin was performed by Pocket Opera in San Francisco and Berkeley. The opera was originally performed in the United States by the Polonia Opera Company under its director Louis Kowalski. He staged the opera in many cities with Polish populations, such as New York in Carnegie Hall, Detroit, Hartford and Chicago. He last staged Halka at Carnegie Hall on May 24, 1959, about 6 months before his death. He was survived by his wife, Carolyn Kowalski, his daughter Wanda and his son, Theodore. An American performance of Halka was performed in New York City by the Bel Canto Opera in the Robert F. Wagner School Theatre in June 1982. The premiere was met with generally positive review by The New York Times, as well as enthusiastic review in the Polish daily on June 16, 1983. To coincide with the bicentennial of Moniuszko (1819-72)'s birth, Theater an der Wien in Austria staged Halka