Mieczysław WEINBERG (1919-1996)
Die Passagierin, Op 97 (1968) [156.15]
Dshamilja Kaiser, mezzo-soprano – Lisa, Nadja Stefanoff, soprano – Marta, Will Hartmann, tenor – Walter, Markus Butter, baritone – Tadeusz, Tetiana Miyus, soprano – Katja, Antonia Cosmina Stancu, mezzo-soprano – Krystina, Joanna Motulewicz, mezzo-soprano – Bronka, Anna Brull, mezzo-soprano – Vlasta, Mareike Jankowski, contralto – Hannah, Sieglinde Feldhofer, soprano – Yvette, Ju Suk, mezzo-soprano – Alte, Joanna Motuliewicz, contralto – Bronka, Ivan Oreščanin and David McShane, basses – 1st and 2nd SS men, Martin Fournier, tenor – 3rd SS man, Konstantin Sfiris, bass – Old passenger, Uschi Plautz, spoken – Female supervisor, Maria Kischmair, spoken – Kapo, Adrián Berthely, spoken – Steward
Chorus of Graz Opera
Graz Philharmonic Orchestra/Roland Kluttig
rec. Graz Opera, Graz, Austria, 11-12 December 2021
CAPRICCIO C5455 [77:36 + 78:39]
After a period of total neglect during its composer’s lifetime, and despite enthusiastic encomiums from his mentor Shostakovich, Weinberg’s opera
The Passenger has suddenly sprung to life since its stage première at Bregenz in 2010 in a production (and performing edition by) Sir David Pountney. This is the third commercial set of the work, and since the preceding two had been full-scale video releases
(review), it is also the first appearance of the score in purely audio terms. The opera itself has succeeded where many previous attempts at a ‘holocaust opera’ had failed, in no small measure because it does not aim at a universal human statement but because it examines the motives and careers of a few fallible human beings who become caught up in the monstrous human tragedy that surrounds and overwhelms them. Nor does it take a didactic stance; indeed, it shows the audience that both the victims and their persecutors suffer in their own different ways when evil is allowed to triumph.
The plot, based on a short story by Polish author Zofia Posymsz, is really fairly straightforward. On a honeymoon cruise, the German protagonist Lisa thinks she sees in a fellow-passenger in a woman she once knew; slowly, and to the horror of her new husband Walter, she reveals that this was in Auschwitz where she once worked as a guard. The discovery slowly unwinds during a series of flashbacks, where Tadeusz, a Polish violinist and the lover of the unknown passenger Marta, was beaten to death when he insisted on playing a Bach chaconne instead of the tawdry waltz requested by the camp commandant. We never even discover if the unknown passenger is a survivor of the death camps, and the expected confrontation never materialises. Just as well; it is hard to know how such a conclusion could have been anything other than melodramatic.
Weinberg’s music, and we are increasingly becoming familiar with it, has its great strengths in its sense of chamber delicacy and lyricism. This style would seem ill-fitted for a description of the horrors of Nazi totalitarianism. Indeed, music is not at its best when it comes to the depiction of evil; after a while, even the most startling succession of grinding discords succumbs to sheer monotony culminating in boredom and finally indifference. How long that process takes will depend on the tolerance of the listener, but it is inevitable nonetheless and most wise composers will attempt to supply a sense of repose or intermission at some point before beginning another series of assaults on the senses. Weinberg does not always manage quite successfully to provide such moments of respite, but the balance is generally excellently managed.
The opera is already tolerably familiar from the video presentation derived from the world première performances at the Bregenz Festival in 2010 and its later successor, and the main point of interest in this new CD set must therefore lie in the emphasis now placed upon Weinberg’s music heard in isolation. Much of this is dangerously thinly scored, with the orchestral accompaniment to the vocal lines often reduced to a single line with skeletal harmonies; but this has the major advantage of throwing the emphasis onto the words of the vocal line, and Weinberg’s writing for the voice is always idiomatic and often sounds grateful to sing. There are none of the violent juxtapositions of register which might seem to be justified or indeed required by the nature of the action itself, and the singers are allowed full rein to express their emotions without resorting to the distortion of sound that is often so deleterious in modern operas. By contrast the cabaret Brecht/Weill style applied to the Nazis is heavily infused with the violence of Shostakovich as evidenced in the “Anna Frank” episode of the latter’s Babi Yar symphony. At moments such as the wordless confrontation of the former SS guard and her supposed victim on the dance floor of the passenger liner directly evokes the catastrophic climax of that movement. It hardly comes as a surprise to learn that Shostakovich, hearing three Bolshoi rehearsals of the score in the 1960s (before it was shelved as an example of “abstract humanism”), described the music as possessing “beauty and greatness”, the drama as “harrowing” and the opera as a whole as “a work of consummate form and style”. The older composer had by this stage in his career – and following the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth – given up the composition of operas, but must have recognised a kindred spirit in this score.
The focus of the opera at first would seem to reside with the character of the former SS guard Lisa, and the libretto by Alexander Medvedev cleverly reworks the original short story to emphasise the relationship between her and her newly-wed husband, who is not only horrified to discover that his new wife has been lying to him and concealing her past, but at the effect that such a disclosure might have on his diplomatic career. In the 1990s I remember watching a harrowing series of German TV interviews with former SS ‘employees’, and found particularly horrifying the fact that, once unconvincingly ritualistic expressions of regret and repentance were out of the way, the mundane and quite ordinary people involved went out of their way almost to justify their actions as seeming right to them at the time. There are elements of that here in the characterisation of Lisa, but in the closing stages of the opera she is dramatically overwhelmed by the tragedies of her victims Marta and Tadeuz which in Weinberg’s hands dominate the closing pages of the score. At this point, Sir David Pountney as the original producer made an adjustment to Weinberg’s music to which David Fallows – credited in this booklet as his co-translator – made strenuous objections in a 2016 Gramophone review of the video production. In Weinberg’s original score the Bach chaconne is played by the full orchestral violin section – he even writes out the notes in full to avoid any misunderstanding of his intentions – like a universal condemnation of the Nazi regime. Pountney instead has the solo violinist onstage begin the chaconne, with the orchestral violins only stealing in after the first minute or so, which of course serves to emphasise the element of individual defiance and undoubtedly has a more dramatic effect.
But musically one can see the point of Weinberg’s original. As revised by Pountney – and it is this version of the score that is employed in this performance – the entry of the massed violins comes at the point where the Bach quotation is already entering into competition with the brutal music written for the Nazis, and the brass elements in the latter are already threatening to overwhelm the string sound even before at the commandant’s orders one of the guards breaks the onstage violin. The sheer overwhelming force of the Bach is undermined; and the situation is rendered worse when the chorus take up the chorale theme with their repetitions of “Pitch black wall of death”. It is abundantly clear from the context that Weinberg envisaged this choral entry as a massive statement of human solidarity, punched out by the massed voices and pinning the audience back in their seats with the same sort of visceral effect as the mob’s cries in the last act of Britten’s Peter Grimes. But here – clearly the result of the backward choral positioning on stage – the balances are askew, with the choir sometimes almost submerged beneath the orchestra and the slow diminuendo into the epilogue seeming over-protracted when it is starting from an already lowered dynamic level. The result is that the musical climax of the work, clearly intended to have its full cathartic effect at this point, is bodily shifted back to the anticlimactic near-encounter on the liner fifteen minutes before. The still small voice of the passenger Marta delivering his epilogue is robbed of its sense of resolution and the desperate seeking for absolution. Even the expressive singing of Nadja Stefanoff cannot supply the missing element here. Dshamilja Kaiser is superbly dramatic as the would-be repentant Lisa, Will Hartmann febrile as her panicking husband, and Markus Butter sweetly lyrical as the violinist. The other roles are well taken, although in a stage production one might perhaps have expected more projected viciousness from some of the SS guards. As I have remarked, the chorus are short-changed by their recorded balance in the closing pages but otherwise the microphone placements are well handled, especially in the clearly tricky perspectives of the scene in the dance hall of the modern passenger liner with its solo accordion. The orchestral sound is slightly dry but always clear.
But then one must not emphasise these negative aspects of this performance, which does us a service in allowing us to hear the music of The passenger without being overwhelmed by the dramatic tragedy with which we are confronted. Those seeking the complete experience will obviously gravitate to the video of the 2010 Bregenz production, but this later Graz presentation obviously has its own value. One must also commend Capriccio for supplying us not only with a brief introduction essay to the work and its origins, but also a complete text and translation. Or should it be described as such? In fact, what we have in this performance is the same multi-lingual libretto – German, Polish, English and Yiddish – as that employed in Bregenz rather than the original Russian actually set by Weinberg, but what we are given in the booklet is a complete text in parallel German and English translation which only rarely coincides with what we are actually hearing. (Some of the sung English accents are decidedly and presumably unintentionally comic.) The opera itself divides almost ideally across two very full CDs, with a break falling between the two Acts.
The booklet also contains a one-page interview with the conductor, where the responsive Roland Kluttig denies that the opera is a “historical work” despite its troubled performance history. He is quite right. It is a work that speaks directly to the modern audience, and as such deserves to be heard again and again in different performances. This is certainly not the final word on a score that commands dedication from its listeners as well as its performers; but Shostakovich was absolutely right when he said “There isn’t a single empty or indifferent note in it.”
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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