Weinberg, Mieczyslaw/Pountney, David. The Passenger

The Passenger is a two-act opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish-Jewish composer who, during WWII, fled to the Soviet Union, where he settled for the rest of his life. The opera’s plot is based on the novel with the same title written by Zofia Posmysz in 1962, the librettist is Alexander Medvedev. It tells the story of Lisa, a former SS guard of Auschwitz-Birkenau, who, when traveling to Brazil on a cruise in the early 1970s, suspects that one passenger on the ship is Marta – a Polish prisoner whom Lisa supervised in the camp.  

The meeting with Marta triggers the memory of the former camp guard, who becomes the narrator of her own and Marta’s interwoven stories. It turns out that Lisa tried to convince Marta to collaborate through sharing information about other inmates and helping with keeping them disciplined and obedient. In order to persuade her, Lisa took advantage of the fact that Marta’s fiancé, Tadeusz, was also imprisoned in Auschwitz; arranging the couple’s reunion, Lisa hoped that Marta would owe her something in return. Although Marta’s response to the offer of collaboration remains untold, Lisa recalls the scene when she rescued Marta from the group of women led to the gas chambers and ordered her to listen to the violin concerto played by Tadeusz whom the camp’s commandant assigned to perform his favorite waltz. 

Unlike the novel, the opera concludes with a crucial epilogue: in front of all the officers, Tadeusz, instead of the commandant’s waltz, plays Ciaconna, the fifth part of Johan Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D-minor. After a moment of consternation, the commandant runs over to Tadeusz, pulls away the violin, destroys it, and sends the violinist to his death. 

Although composed in 1968, the opera was not performed until 2006, when the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow produced a semi-staged adaptation. It is, however, the staging proposed by David Pountney at the Bregenz Festival in 2010, that has become a canonical point of reference for all subsequent performances. In comparison to the original, exclusively Russian, libretto, Pountney’s adaptation emphasizes the national and ethnic, thus, linguistic diversity of Auschwitz. Therefore, since 2010 The Passenger consists of passages sung, among others, in German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, or Greek. Moreover, stage designer Johan Engels has utilized the mise en abîme structure of the story, dividing the opera’s set into two vertical parts, with the top being the cruise scenery for Lisa’s unforeseen encounter with the past, and the concentration camp at the bottom of both the stage and Lisa’s repressed memory.  

The Passenger is, therefore, an innovative multidimensional operatic commentary on the Holocaust seen through the eyes of the concentration camp guard. Aside from assigning the perpetrator as the narrator of the story, or raising the question of prisoners’ complicity, the opera most of all addresses the topic of violence committed through music, and simultaneously uses the music as the main medium of the conveyed message.

Author of this entry: Mateusz Miesiac.

The Passenger, composed by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, directed by David Poutney, based on the book by Zofia Posmysz. Bergenzer Festspiele, 2010.