structural:summarization
Poland

Poland belonged at this time to Russia. The pioneer of modern Polish opera was Stanisław Moniuszko. He composed several operettas until he moved to the big genre with Halka (1847), his greatest success. In this, as in almost all his works, he showed the relations between the Polish nobility and the townspeople as victims of their cruelty. In his works he introduced Polish folk dances, such as the mazurka or the polonaise. After him, for a time the Wagnerian influence was felt, as in the work of Władysław Żeleński (Konrad Wallenrod, 1885) and Ludomir Różycki (Meduza, 1912).

After Poland's independence, which occurred after World War I, Karol Szymanowski was the main architect of a Polish national music. He lived in Zakopane, in the Tatra Mountains, where he studied the syncopated rhythms played there. His first work was Hagith (1913), which denoted German, French and Russian influences. His masterpiece was Król Roger (King Roger, 1924), an evocative, richly nuanced and colorfully orchestrated work, somewhat influenced by Maurice Ravel 's Daphnis et Chloé. Other composers were: Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Manru, 1901), Henryk Opieński (Maria, 1905) and Witold Maliszewski (Syrena, 1927).