The Lilies is a ballad by Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish Romantic poet and playwright. Iwona Rusek elaborated and dramatized this short poetic piece into an extensive radio play. The ballad has a simple plot: a knight returns from a war expedition, and his unfaithful wife, fearing punishment for her betrayal, kills him and buries him in the forest. She plants lilies on the grave. The murdered knight’s brothers arrive to visit him, and when he does not return they begin to believe that he died on the way back from the war. They want the sweet widow to marry one of them. The Lady likes both brothers and doesn’t know which one to choose. On the advice of a wise hermit, the heroine asks the brothers to make wreaths of wild flowers, saying that she will marry the one whose wreath she chooses. The brothers place their wreaths on the altar in the church, unaware that they have woven lilies from the murdered knight’s grave into them. The lilies wake the dead man, who rises from the grave and takes terrible revenge on his unfaithful wife: the church, along with all those assembled inside it, collapses underground. Iwona Rusek extended the plot of the ballad, deepened the psychological portraits of the characters by writing some juicy monologues, and added characters from Slavic folklore –Wind-of-the-Fields and Rodzanice (Slavic Fates). The author managed to retain Mickiewicz’s characteristic versification.
I decided not to include illustrative sounds in the radio drama, but I asked the composer to create original music, which combined modern electronic sounds with folk white singing. The sound convention of the thriller matched the motifs of black romanticism, in which nature defends justice and every crime needs to be punished.
https://www.polskieradio.pl/357/6991/Artykul/2514925
