On 19 March 2018 Krzysztof Knittel was honored with the Theater Award of the City of Gdansk 2017 for the music to the opera The Last Judgment.
The Theater Award of the City of Gdańsk has been awarded since 2008 to the authors of the most valuable theatrical artistic creations in the year preceding the award. The winners are chosen by the Chapter of the Theater Award of the City of Gdańsk. This year's gala was held at the Wybrzeże Theater in Gdańsk. Krzysztof Knittel received the award in the "Music" category for a two-act opera The Last Judgment, based on the libretto by Mirosław Bujko, which premiere took place on 8 November 2017 on the stage of the Baltic Opera. The project was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the "Collections" program – the priority "Composition Commissions", implemented by the Institute of Music and Dance for 2016-2017 and the programme in the field of artistic creation and cultural education – priority "Music" for the year 2017.
Loots, rapes and dark secrets are part of the story of Hans Memling's triptych The Last Judgment. The mystical history of the painting became the base of the libretto of the Knittel's opera under the same title. The piece shows the legendary, turbulent fate of the famous triptych by Hans Memling – from ordering the work to the return of the painting to Gdańsk in the middle of the 20th century. Sixteen scenes of the drama are a sequence of images that are distant in time and space, the diversity of which is enhanced by a different sound layer in each stage -–from static chords, through restless glissandos, clusters, repeated melodic figures. The large orchestra has been enriched with an extensive percussion section and electronics. A prophetic chorus is accompanied by a series of diverse figures of the drama, mainly male voices, announcing, on the sounds of the repetition of the melody several times, the coming of the Last Judgment. Fragments of the opera can be seen on the website of the Baltic Opera.