Die Passagierin

Mieczysław Weinberg, until recently a forgotten composer, wrote his opera—completed in 1968 and rediscovered internationally since 2010—as a response to the suppression of the Holocaust in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union. His work approaches the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz from a dual perspective of memory: it confronts the involuntary, embellished, and incomplete confessions of a former concentration camp guard with the violence suffered by the inmates.

“If the echo of their voices fades, we are lost.” This line by Paul Éluard is placed at the beginning of the score. In this spirit, Weinberg gives every individual voice and fate within the women’s ensemble—made up of eight prisoners from the women’s concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau—a vivid, unforgettable profile. At the center of this ensemble stands Marta, a young Polish woman who is reunited with her fiancé Taddeusz in the camp and witnesses his murder.

Weinberg and his librettist Alexander Medvedev do not aim for a direct, realistic depiction of camp life. Instead, they approach the indescribable horror through a double perspective of memory: In 1960, aboard an ocean liner, Marta again encounters her tormentor, the camp guard Anna-Lisa Franz. Anna-Lisa, whose husband knows nothing of her past, is traveling with him to Brazil, where he will take up his post as the Federal Republic of Germany’s consul. The opera confronts the involuntary, embellished, and incomplete confessions of “Lieschen” with the unimaginable violence suffered by the inmates.

Mieczysław Weinberg, the only member of his family to escape the Germans by fleeing from Poland to the Soviet Union, was imprisoned in 1953 as part of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign, escaping its consequences only through Stalin’s death. In the mid-1960s, he dared to address the theme of the Holocaust. Dmitri Shostakovich had drawn his friend Weinberg’s attention to the novel “The Passenger” by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, published in 1962. In this novel, Posmysz masterfully analyzes the reversal of victim and perpetrator in West German consciousness through the unexpected encounter of two women. Weinberg’s librettist managed to carve an operatic scenario from the novel. The composer set the concise and pointed language with precise, expressive gestures, embedding it in a symphonic score that lets a variety of sound worlds interact with dramaturgical sophistication: liturgical laments for the dead, perversely distorted waltz tunes, songs evoking destroyed homeland, freedom, life, and love, the sounds of a jazz combo, and repeated quotations of classical German music: Bach, Beethoven, Schubert. Even though Shostakovich was unable to break the official ban on performances of the opera, today’s listeners must agree with his enthusiasm: