This essay analyses and interprets the scores, recordings, and media used in Knittel and King's The Heart Piece - Double Opera (1999) and Stulgińska's Three Women for three women and ten instruments (2017), two semi-improvised Polish operas using performance art and interaction between sound, text, choreography, lighting, theatrical form and electronic medium. In Stuglińska's modern music theatre, the listener follows different sound sources and the setting: choreography, performers' and speakers' arrangement on stage, props and lighting, whose intensity dictates the form. The Heart Piece chamber opera is a two - Polish and American - composers' take on Müller's play Herzstück, with separate movements in their native languages. Music and text create an interactive setting, and their notation and semantics make music both seen and heard. These works use the concept of hybridization and, in Wolf's terminology, intracompositional intermediality, where different means of expression create an intermedial discourse, a complementary whole and a new syncretistic medium.

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Krzysztof Knittel, a composer who has been writing at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, is faithful to his artistic vision that bears testimony to his affiliation to the transavantgarde aimed at synthesizing the codes of modernity and tradition. One of its manifestations is the phenomenon of intermediality, picturing the relationships emerging between a given object (action) and media. Novelty in Knit- tel’s works is based on composing intuitive music, described as free improvised music, and recycled, or ecological, music. The 1970s saw increased interest in the sacred and the spiritual in Polish music. The song cycle Z głębokości wołam do Ciebie, Panie... (‘Out of the depths I cry to thee, O LORD!’, 2000) for choir and electronic media, the first religious composition by Knittel, was written, as the composer claims, ‘to express the truth and the strength of faith’. The songs were written to texts of the Psalter of King David from Biblia Tysiąclecia (‘The Millenium Bible’). The aim of this article is to assess how the source of inspiration influenced the structure and aesthetics of the intermedial work being discussed.

The subject of analysis is the contemporary opera Madame Curie (2010) by the Polish composer Elżbieta Sikora, premiered in 2011 in Paris. In an extremely emotional way, using innovative techniques for expression, the composer tells the story of the scientist Maria Skłodowska-Curie in the form of a script for the opera, with anxiety as the main idea of the libretto. This dramatic work is an example of an intermedia work in which the composer uses electronic media alongside traditional instruments. The composition is an intermedia spectacle revealing the symbolic significance of the sound emission interacting with the libretto, choreography, lighting, ancient Greek theatre form and an electronic medium. Despite being divided into scenes, the piece was directed using a single set representing the laboratory of the Polish Nobel Prize winner. The director patterned the staging of this opera after Greek theatre: for action on stage, the whole proscenium was used, and the orchestra was seated at the back of the stage (not in the orchestra pit), the soloists at the front, next to the spectators, while the conductor led the ensemble with the help of a video camera, not seeing the soloists. The chorus was amphitheatrically seated on chairs on both sides of the stage to follow the action on stage with the eye of a censor. Every role required of its actor great craft, extraordinary skill and professionalism. The aim of the presentation will have been a multi-aspect analysis and interpretation of the score and the recording of the opera, as well as a discussion of the characteristics of voice projection in this complex work. The article presents a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of the opera's score and recordng.

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