Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996)
Die Passagerein, Op 97 (1968)
Lisa – Dshamilja Kaiser (mezzo-soprano)
Walter – Will Hartmann (tenor)
Marta – Nadja Stefanoff (soprano)
Tadeusz – Markus Butter (baritone)
Katja – Tetiana Miyus (soprano)
Grazer Philharmoniker/Roland Kluttig
Stage Director – Roland Loschky
rec. 2021, Oper Graz, Austria
NAXOS NBD0144V Blu-ray [143]
The music of Weinberg first came my way in the early 1970s on an HMV/Melodiya LP of his Fourth Symphony and violin concerto played by Leonid Kogan accompanied by Kirill Kondrashin, which greatly interested me and prompted me to learn more about this fascinating composer’s music. I was then fortunate to attend a concert in Leningrad in 1986 of his Twelfth Symphony played by the Novosibirsk Philharmonic under Arnold Katz. Sadly, the attendance was poor, but it urged me to hear more of his music. In the 1990s Olympia released a series of his chamber music and his symphonies, all of which revealed a major neglected talent. We are lucky that much of his works is available online or on CDs; this is the second recording of this opera to appear on DVD/Blu-ray and will surely attract interest in this outstanding Soviet composer.
Born in Warsaw in 1919 (or 1918), Weinberg showed outstanding gifts and entered the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in 1931, studying piano until 1939, after which he sought refuge in Minsk in the Soviet Union, where he studied composition with Zolotaryov. After the Nazi attack in 1941, Weinberg was exiled to the relative safety of Tashkent in Uzbekistan where he composed for the Opera Theatre and met his wife Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels (whose brother was a famous singer).
A major step in his career was sending his First Symphony to Shostakovich. Impressed by the young composer, Shostakovich invited him to Moscow to assist his career and where he was able to get support from the Composers’ Union. His works, written in a late Romantic style with influences of Jewish songs and jazz idioms, were well received until the infamous 1948 Composers Congress when his music was criticised for being ‘cosmopolitanism’. Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes was premiered by David Oistrakh; however, in 1953 Weinberg was arrested as part of the ‘Doctors Plot’ but released following an appeal by Shostakovich.
Although Weinberg was never a student of Shostakovich, he was greatly influenced by his music and wrote extensively in the symphonic genre, composing no less than twenty-two symphonies, four chamber symphonies and two symphoniettas. He also wrote seventeen string quartets, seven violin sonatas, and seven operas, of which The Passenger is the first, written relatively late in his career in 1968. Regrettably, the composer never saw the staging of his favourite stage work; a staging at the Bolshoi Theatre was cancelled and it was not premiered until 2006, in Moscow in a semi-staged performance. It achieved a wider audience when it was staged at the Bregenz Festival in 2010, and has since been performed widely, including a BBC Radio 3 transmission from the English National Opera. It is based on the Polish writer’s Zofia Posmyz’s 1959 radio play ‘The Passenger from Room 45’ which Shostakovich suggested to the librettist Alexander Medvedev. ‘I cannot stop enthusing about Weinberg’s The Passenger. […] every time I understand more of the beauty and greatness of this music. It is a work of consummate form and style.’
The opera opens in 1960 on a cruise ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, where the former Auschwitz guard Lisa is travelling with her diplomat husband Walter and she sees one of her former prisoners Marta as a fellow passenger, awakening her memories and fear of being recognised. Switching to Auschwitz in the war years, we meet three SS guards at the camp. Lisa has chosen Marta out of the women prisoners as her confidant, and when more internees arrive tells Marta to translate a Russian girl’s hidden love letter, which is really her own letter to her fellow prisoner Tadeusz – her lost lover.
In the second act, Tadeusz and Marta meet after a gap of two years in the camp. Lisa offers to help the two lovers to meet each other, yet he rejects the help. At her birthday party, Lisa tells cruelly Marta that her lover doesn’t want her any more. The SS arrive to select those who are to be killed. Tadeusz is told to play Bach’s Chaconne for the camp commandant and is then executed. In a moving epilogue, Marta remembers her lover and her friends, and in a beautifully sung aria pledges never to forget them.
While the idiom is often harrowing, the humanity of Weinberg’s music comes through powerfully. His score embraces neo-Romanticism with inflections from Polish, Russian and Jewish music, yet Weinberg imposes his own identity with his harmonic polytonality and freely expressive language, often showing an affinity with Britten, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. This opera reveals Weinberg as among the most neglected of composers and I hope that more of his operas will be performed.
The huge orchestra includes alto saxophone, guitar, marimba, vibraphone, accordion, glockenspiel and jazz percussion. The action switches between the cruise ship, and the Auschwitz concentration camp, with minimal interruption to scene changes, often effected by only a brief curtain change. Dshamilja Kaiser’s Lisa is outstanding, providing a complete characterization of this tortured woman who cannot escape her past, and Nadja Stefanoff’s Marta is heart- breaking throughout - although in the first act, she is mostly muted and comes alive only in the second act, when she meets her lover. Her final aria is deeply moving.
Markus Butter as Tadeusz does not have such a prominent part in the drama. The hapless figure of Walter, Lisa’s husband, is well characterised with finely pitched singing and acting by Will Hartmann. Of the other roles, one must mention the Katja of Tetiana Miyus in her beautifully sung Russian lament before her execution. In all, the roles of the other prisoners and the cruise ship passengers are well performed by the Chor der Oper Graz and the orchestra is masterfully directed by Roland Kluttig. The video presentation is clear with well-directed closeups of the most important scenes.
The booklet has a synopsis and an article on the opera with texts in English and German and photos from the opera scenes. There is a two-CD set of the performance available on Capriccio C5455. This Blu-ray is recommended to all those interested in 20th century music.
Gregor Tassie
Production Staff
Set Designer – Etienna Pluss
Costumer Designer – Irina Spreckelmeyer
Lighting Designer – Sebastian Alphons
Chor der Oper Graz/Bernhard Schneider
Dramaturgy – Marlene Hahn and Yvonne Gebauer
Video – Christian Weissenberger
Video details
Filmed in HD from a HD source
Picture format -HD 16:9
Sound - PCM stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1
Region code: A, B, C
Languages: German, Polish, French, Czech, Yiddish, Russian and English
Subtitles: German, English, Japanese, Korean
Video Director – Axel Stummer
