Opera Rara is a Krakow festival of forgotten, extraordinary operas, unfairly overlooked—and reinterpreted—through staging, choreography, arrangement, or unusual venues, held since 2009.

Opera Rara performances are often held at the Słowacki Theatre. Equally recognizable as the beautiful theatre building is the curtain painted by Henryk Siemiradzki—one of the most important, and certainly the largest, classical painting in Krakow. It's also worth noting that it's not the best painting—in art history textbooks, Siemiradzki's paintings are cited as examples of truly poor composition. But it's dense, colorful, allegorical, monumental, and pompous—and therefore operatic. Moreover, Siemiradzki painted two such curtains, one for Krakow, the other for the Municipal Theatre in Lviv, and their unveiling was quite an event in Galicia at the time. I thought both paintings made a wonderful decoration for the festival—and really, that's not much more needed. Black and white and simple, bold lettering are all you need to break through the chaos. I also designed the logo in the same spirit – I was amused by the similarity of the initials OR and the ® symbol, so I made it the Festival logo.

Collaboration: Karolina Pamuła
Photos: Klaudyna Shubert, Filip Adamus, Jacek Poremba, Michał Ramus