The Passenger

An opera by the late Mieczyslaw Weinberg based on a radio play by Zofia Posmysz, libretto by Alexander Medvedev.

As part of New York City’s Lincoln Center festival, the opera was performed by the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra, conducted by Patrick Summers, staged at the Park Avenue Armory, a grand venue.

The Passenger is about heaven and hell. In heaven, one is aboard a ship bound for Brazil. Passengers walk the deck, drink, dance. All is white: the people, their clothes, the band, their instruments. All is pure until it is divulged … Walter is a German diplomat who is going to Brazil with his wife to take a post. A new life, a new world. It is the early 1960s. His wife, Liese sees a veiled woman walking the deck and she recoils. She is forced to finally reveal to her husband that she had been an S.S. Overseer at Auschwitz. The veiled woman was Marta,  a Polish prisoner in her barracks whom she had sent to “the black wall, ” her death.

Now, the perfect vacation, second honeymoon and change of homeland is followed by a cloud. If the woman is indeed Marta, Liese and Walter’s lives will fall apart–they have begun to already. The poisonous past is percolating upward: below the deck is Auschwitz, its blackness, smoke and ashes seeping skyward with the vaporized dead. Is Marta real or an apparition? Is Liese’s terror her guilt haunting her?

Liese: That was our duty, those were the orders from our beloved Führer!

 

 

World’s collide and unfold. The scenes go back and forth in time providing revelation after revelation of pain and loss, horror and disbelief. While the dancers waltz above, there is brutality below.

(Chorus)

Concentration camp, that’s what they call you.
Oswiezim! (Auschwitz) But a prisoner may be granted his freedom.
From a camp one hopes to return home.
But the gates of Auschwitz only open inwards.
Oswiezim!

_________________________________________________________________

Walter: Your confession moves me very much, however bitter and painful.

Liese: All right, I was in Auschwitz
but that does not mean I’m a criminal.
I was an honorable German. I am proud that I did my duty…

I was so frightened that you would abandon me.

Walter: Poor little creature, how you’ve suffered, how it tortured you.

Liese: Must I really feel responsible for the world and all of its suffering?

____________________________________________________________________

 

 

The inexorable pain of the prisoners and its validity is overwhelming, based on what we know, what we have witnessed, make Liese’s plea for exoneration laughable. She takes no responsibility, in fact she tries to confront Marta on the deck:

Liese: I want to hear her thank me for the fact she is living.

Walter: Have you gone mad?

Liese: That she has survived and is here.

Walter: Have you gone mad?

Liese: That she has survived and is here dancing!

_____________________________________________________________

Epilogue

(Marta)

If one day your voices should … if they should fall silent …
if they should fall silent then we are all extinguished.
I hear you: “Do not forgive them, never ever.”Katya, Katuscha, and you Vlasta …
Hannah, Ivette, and you my Tadeuz.

I swear, I swear I will never, I will never forget you.

_______________________________________________________________

The set design is masterful, brilliant. The ship is above angled to the stage, the barracks and watch towers roll and pivot along real rail tracks. Design by Johan Engels.

 

From The New York Times >

What Lies Beneath: A Haunting Nazi Past

 Backstory