Bezmatek

Presentation

Bezmatek (The Queenless Hive) is a contemporary opera inspired by Mira Marcinów’s acclaimed novel. It transforms the intimate loss of a mother into a universal story of female identity, care, memory and human connection with nature. A daughter cares for her dying mother while becoming a mother herself. After death, the mother remains present through clothes, smells, songs and fragmented memories.
The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of 1990s post-communist Poland—a era of rapid transition marked by nostalgia, material scarcity and a makeshift everyday reality. This unique aesthetic environment of shifting values and bittersweet contrast between old shortages and new aspirations shapes the emotional landscape of the family.
The title provides the opera’s central metaphor. In Polish beekeeping, bezmatek describes a colony that has lost its queen. Disoriented, its sound changes into an intense collective hum. The daughter’s grief and the queenless hive mirror one another, expanding individual loss into a reflection on community, ecology and interdependence.
Bezmatek is conceived as a collective mourning ritual rooted in Central and Eastern European cultural memory. Monika Szpyrka’s score brings contemporary composition into dialogue with breath, bioacoustic hive sounds, white-voice singing and traditional funeral laments. A twelve-verse farewell song marking the hours of dying becomes a structural spine, where intimate breathing meets a collective choir of female voices.
Through voice, body and sound, private sorrow transforms into a shared acoustic memory, exploring what remains after loss—and how absence shapes a new form of presence.

Co-producing Partners