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The Passenger - Surviving and Remembering
Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Passenger as an opera at the Bregenz Festspielhaus. Shocking, incisive, dramatic.

Two young women, both on their way to a new, different life, are caught up in their shared history on a ship: Mieczysław Weinberg's The Passenger, based on the novel of the same name by Polish Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, can be seen as an opera at the Festspielhaus in summer 2010. completed in 1968, the work by the Polish-Russian composer was first performed in concert form in Moscow only in 2006.

The Passenger is set in the early 1960s on an ocean liner bound for Brazil. On board is a German diplomat who, accompanied by his young wife Lisa, is traveling to South America to take up a new post. To her great horror, Lisa recognizes among the other passengers a woman whom she actually believes to be dead. Faced with this shocking encounter, she reveals to her husband that she was once an SS supervisor at Auschwitz. From now on, the opera's setting shifts back and forth between the ship and the Auschwitz concentration camp: while Lisa tries to come to terms with the memory of her ambivalent relationship with the camp prisoner Martha, her husband struggles with the revelation of a past that shows him his wife in a completely new light.

The Passenger is considered a work of extraordinary originality and gigantic proportions. Shostakovich himself called Weinberg's opera a masterpiece and tried to use all his influence to bring it to the stage: "I never tire of being enthusiastic about this opera. The music shocks with its drama. It is concise and pictorial; there is not a single 'empty', indifferent note in it." But even this flaming plea did not help: although four Soviet opera houses expressed great interest in a performance at the time, the cultural authorities vetoed it every time. (Babette Karner, Bregenz Festival)

This is a strong recommendation: the DVD of the Bregenz performance of Mieczysław Weinberg's opera "The Passenger" is convincing due to its precise staging, well thought-out stage design, suspenseful plot, character drawing and embodiment, the recitatives as well as the individual and choral singing, and the orchestral music. Incidentally, the opera DVD also surprises with exceptionally good camera work and excellent, very informative extras, such as a documentary entitled "In der Fremde." (Revierpassagen)