Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996)
Die Passagierin (The Passenger) Op 97, opera in two acts, eight scenes and an epilogue (1968)
Lisa - Dshamilja Kaiser
Walter - Will Hartmann
Marta - Nadja Stefanoff
Tadeusz - Markus Butter
Chor der Oper Graz
Grazer Philharmoniker/Roland Kluttig
Nadja Loschky (stage direction)
rec. 2021, Oper Graz, Austria
NAXOS NBD0144V Blu-ray [143]
Weinberg based his opera The Passenger on the novel of the same name by Polish author Zofia Posmysz, an Auschwitz survivor. The plot concerns the chance meeting on an ocean liner bound for Brazil between Lisa, a former SS guard at Auschwitz, and Marta, a prisoner at the camp. Shostakovich read the novel and recommended the work to his friend Weinberg with the suggestion that it could be made into an opera. The Passenger was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre. Weinberg completed it in 1968 to a Russian libretto by Alexander Medvedev. The drama reflects the composer’s ordeals of both wartime trauma (his Jewish family all perished) and Soviet persecution (his father-in-law was murdered). It reached rehearsal stage at the Bolshoi but never saw public performance in the composer’s lifetime. He was bitterly disappointed. He thought it his most important work, and the score had deeply impressed Shostakovich.
The libretto requires a setting that reflects both the present and the past: the ship on which Lisa and Marta are sailing, and the concentration camp in which they had been an overseer and an inmate. Six of the work’s eight scenes occur in Auschwitz, implicitly recalled in flashback by those on board the ship. This production has a single set, an uncluttered, colourless, vaguely domestic interior space. Costumes and a few props serve to show us where we are at any point. Tables and English-speaking waiters clad in white suggest a ship. Striped, coarse textured prison garb puts us inside the camp.
In at least one scene these location aspects are combined, when new inmates arrive at Auschwitz in scene 3, while tables, chairs and some costumes suggest we are at sea. “Will anyone understand what we suffered here” asks a prisoner, when the “here” is the dining room of a luxury liner. This is either merely muddling or profound, depending on your interpretation. Perhaps director Nadja Loschky knows her T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets begin:
Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
Whatever else The Passenger is about concerns the relationship of its characters to time, and the possibility of redemption. The prisoners are haunted by their imperilled future, Lisa by her “eternally present” past. Her diplomat husband Walter, who learns only on the ship that his wife was in the SS, sings “the past deforms our inner being” almost before he knows how prescient that is.
Doubtless other productions might employ a vertically or horizontally split-screen effect (Weinberg envisioned something of that sort), dividing the stage to keep ship and camp, or present and past, separate but in view. That avoids muddle but also misses opportunities to challenge the viewer and provoke thoughts of a work’s deeper meanings. This is the only version I have heard or seen, and I was impressed by its intelligence despite the occasional confusions. It has some miscalculations, not least the (derivative) spectacle of SS officers squatting on a row of toilets. Their uniformly freakish haircuts had already provided enough visual ridicule for the boorish brutes.
Deepening the layers of time is the omnipresence of a very old Lisa, now minus husband, sitting or walking the stage as the action shows both her pasts, that in Auschwitz and that on the ship. Her encounter there with Marta is inconclusive, “unredeemed”; she does not speak to this woman or even confirm her exact identity. She claims this shipboard Marta requests the band to play the camp Kommandant’s favourite banal waltz, but that request is never shown to us and could be mere coincidence. This ambiguity means no closure for Lisa, whose much older self still wanders spectre-like around the scenes – as Eliot again says, “footfalls echo in the memory”. The drama is also kept moving, the film not even allowing more than a short pause between Acts One and Two, with no applause before or after the performance. There are a few cutaway shots of the orchestra but mostly we cannot escape the harrowing tale on stage.
The score is brilliant and powerful, in a mostly modernist style with folk elements, and with an orchestra hardly less engaged in illustrating the drama than in Wagner. The orchestra delivers the crucial coup de théatre in the climactic Auschwitz concert of Scene Eight. Marta’s fiancé Tadeusz is a violinist instructed to play the Kommandant’s favourite waltz, but in a fatal act of rebellion plays instead the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, heard first as a solo from the pit, then on full strings (but the composer wanted the latter throughout). The symbolism is profound. Celan’s great genocide poem “Deathfugue” contains the famous line der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland (“Death is a master from Germany”). This evocation of the German Meister (as in Meister Eckhart of Die Meistersinger) is flung in the face of Nazism. What greater German Meister than J.S. Bach, and his greatest piece for just four strings, to remind the gathered SS of their disastrous descent from the heights of their culture and humanity? It is an overwhelming moment in the opera, even though Weinberg could not have known what later scholarship would reveal: Bach’s Chaconne draws on German chorales which have the theme of death and resurrection, giving it still deeper resonance.
The casting has no weak link. The composer is perhaps concerned more in supporting the text than producing grateful vocal parts, but the singers provide devoted acting and singing. The male leads have smallish roles. Will Hartmann’s Walter convinces as the shell-shocked husband concerned for his career if he becomes known as “the diplomat who married an SS officer”. As Marta’s fiancé Tadeusz, Markus Butter looks and sounds well as a prisoner concerned that Marta does not suffer from her association with him. His encounter with Dshamilja Kaiser’s Lisa, who carries the largest and most demanding role well, is a real flashpoint. Among the prisoners, all but Tadeusz are women with shaven heads and prison stripes, but Weinberg still manages to distinguish them vocally. The Russian Katja sung by Tetiana Miyus has the advantage of the request for a solo folksong in Scene Six, which she sings exquisitely. Purely vocal honours though probably go to the Marta of Nadja Stefanoff, who projects innate goodness and inner strength, and sings with beautiful tone and line. The choral part is original in its sometimes whispered contributions to the drama, often suggesting intimations, warnings, naggings of conscience. The Chorus of Oper Graz and the Graz Philharmonic sing and play as participants in the action, which they are, and Roland Kluttig’s musical direction is very committed.
There is a booklet in English and German with cast, track details, background notes and plot synopsis. The surround sound on this Blu-ray disc is very effective. I do not know another version; David Pountney’s 2010 production from Bregenz has its admirers (review). On its own terms, however, this Graz account makes, at the least, a very good case for a powerful and important work.
Roy Westbrook
Previous review: Gregor Tassie
Other personnel
Katja - Tetiana Miyus
Krystina - Antonia Cosmina Stancu
Vlasta - Anna Brull
Hannah - Mareike Jankowski
Yvette - Sieglinde Feldhofer
Bronka - Joanna Motulewicz
Old Woman - Ju Suk
First SS Officer - Ivan Oreščanin
Second SS Officer - David McShane
Third SS Officer - Martin Fournier
Elderly Passenger - Konstantin Sfiris
Senior Overseer - Uschi Plautz
Lisa as an Old Woman - Isabella Albrecht
Young Lisa - Viktoria Riedl
Kapo - Maria Kirchmair
Steward - Adrián Berthely
Etienne Pluss, set design
Irina Spreckelmeyer, costume design
Sebastian Alphons, lighting design
Video details
Picture format: 1080i High Definition.
Sound format: PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital 5.1. Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Audio languages: German, Polish, French, Czech, Yiddish, Russian, English
Subtitles: German, English, Japanese, Korean
Published: November 8, 2022
