Weinberg's Die Passagierin dedicated to Basia Jaworski...

When it became known that Mieczysław Weinberg's Die Passagierin would be performed by the National Opera, Basia Jaworski, editor of the music and theater blog Basia con Fuoco, jumped for joy. She had long been a great fan of Weinberg. I must write 'she was'. She probably wouldn't have been able to attend anyway, but she absolutely wanted to write a review. She passed away last January. That is why this review, my first for Klassiek Centraal, is dedicated to Basia. I had to get used to Weinberg's idiom for a while, or rather idioms; he easily navigates between lyricism and then 'more conservative' than that of his Soviet-era patron Dmitri Shostakovich, and Shostakovichian satire. My baptism by fire for a live performance of something from his oeuvre was the performance of Weinberg's third symphony by Weinberg pioneer Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. For the rest, there were scattered CDs, on Naxos and subsequently the beginning of a cycle of symphonies under Gražinytė-Tyla for DG. In fact, I had already become intensively acquainted with his music through the score for the film When the Cranes Are Flying (Letjat zhuravli, 1957, directed by Michail Kalatozov), which I only later realized had been composed by Weinberg. Incidentally, one of Basia's favorite films; I was able to bring her the good news that the film's music was by Weinberg. This decidedly unpatriotic film dates from the years after Stalin's death in 1953, when, after the repression and antisemitism of the Stalin era, under his successor Khrushchev a certain political thaw set in in the Soviet Union. But Khrushchev made way in 1964 for the more rigid triumvirate of Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny, and Weinberg encountered new limits to artistic freedom when his opera Die Passagierin was scheduled to premiere in 1968 at the Bolshoi Theatre, but was shelved on orders from the authorities. Perhaps partly out of fear of associations with the notorious Gulag labor camps, but perhaps also because a work by a Polish Jew was by then becoming less welcome again. Die Passagierin is based on a story published in Poland in 1959, The Passenger from Cabin 45 (Pasażerka z kabiny 45), by Polish Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, which had meanwhile been adapted into a radio play, a novel, a television drama and a feature film. All during a 'Polish spring' that was possible during Khrushchev's rule in Moscow. Ultimately, it would not be until 2006 that Weinberg's opera received its premiere, in Moscow, in semi-concert form. With an opera like this, you cannot escape going into the content and background as extensively as possible. Weinberg was a Polish-Jewish composer who had fled to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. His family perished in the Trawniki concentration camp, which was also intended as a training camp for collaborators. Die Passagierin is set partly in Auschwitz concentration camp. In the plot, the element of collaboration plays a role. The plot spans two time periods: one story takes place around 1960 aboard a passenger ship traveling from Europe to Brazil, the other in Auschwitz camp in 1944. The story revolves around two women. One is the former Auschwitz camp guard Lisa. Twenty years after the war, she is traveling with her husband, a diplomat, from Germany to Brazil to start a new future there and especially to leave her past behind. But that past catches up with her when she thinks she recognizes in a fellow passenger one of the inmates in Auschwitz, Marta; the other woman around whom Die Passagierin revolves. I was reminded of the recent film It was just an accident by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, in which former political prisoners think they recognize their sadistic prison guard by the sound of the footsteps of a limping man, but whom they, locked in darkness and blindfolded, could never have seen. The film is also about traumatic past and the pressing uncertainty of whether and how they should react to a man who perhaps was not that guard.

With Lisa, it is the perpetrator who is in uncertainty. Incidentally, it is not so much remorse that obsesses her as the idea that her past could endanger her future. Her husband is furious but also not least because he can probably kiss his career as a diplomat goodbye if everything came out.

The story of the original author, Zofia Posmysz, is based on a personal experience that in turn comes closer to the plot of It was just an accident. At the age of 19, she was arrested by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and deported to Auschwitz. Years later, when she visited Paris as a journalist, she heard a woman speaking German in a voice that reminded her of an Auschwitz camp commandant. That woman turned out not to be the person in question. In Die Passagierin too, and presumably also in Zofia Posmysz's original story, it remains unclear whether the woman Lisa sees is really Marta. The production is by Tobias Kratzer at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich; in relation to German history, of course a loaded city. In Bayreuth I saw an innovative Tannhäuser directed by Kratzer and he is currently working on a Ring in Munich; Die Walküre has just been released. I'm curious what he will do at the end of Die Götterdämmerung with the Rhine which, according to the libretto, overflows its banks and washes away all worries and misery. Will that be as much of an ocean as he shows in Die Passagierin and which some passengers on board the ship hope might perhaps wash away all worries and misery? After we see undulating water as far as the eye can see on a front curtain during the opening measures, the set of the first act comes into view: the side of a giant cruise ship. Passengers sit in their cabins or walk on the lower decks. First comes an old woman into view, who represents a third narrative line, one in which Lisa in the present, at an advanced age, travels back to Europe and sees herself on board the ship as she once traveled away from Europe. We see how the older Lisa is startled when she sees her 'self' from 1960 coming out of her cabin. The 1960 Lisa then sees on a deck below her the woman who is Marta or resembles Marta. Lisa is extra startled because as far as she knows, Marta had been transferred to the 'death block' in Auschwitz. Her husband joins her, preparing for a dinner and dance party. When Lisa expresses what is troubling her, he becomes furious; as mentioned, not so much out of moral outrage as because he fears for their career prospects in their new homeland Brazil. At the end of the first act, we see the old woman clambering over the ship's railing and disappearing from view. Now an underwater film projection is shown on the front curtain of a woman thrashing about and reaching out. Has the old woman we saw before committed suicide, or are these nightmares that cannot be washed away above, but also below the sea surface? Lady Macbeth in thousandfold or millionfold measure. In this context, the design of the ship is also interesting. David Hockney-like, bright colours, ideal image of a 'clean' ordered society, which Hockney showed as an illusion. Two striking elements in the image are a red-and-white striped bath towel hanging over the railing and a red-and-white striped deck chair. Director Tobias Kratzer said in an interview that he did not want to show barracks and striped camp clothing as we know them all too well from photographs. The red stripes may then still be references to camp images; but then 'improbably' cleaned up.

This also means that Auschwitz sometimes goes out of view in this production. In the first part, the transition from scenes that take place on board the cruise ship to scenes in the concentration camp is often quite unclear. Yes, the libretto often jumps very quickly from 1960 to 1944 and vice versa; perhaps here the cuts in this shortened version are to blame – half an hour has been cut from the original version, including a prominent character, Katja, a young Russian partisan.

Why would those cuts have been made? I don't know the original version (although there are now two performances on CD and a DVD of the first fully staged version from the Bregenzer Festspiele 2010), but I can imagine that the team that made these cuts, the director, the dramaturg and the Russian-Jewish conductor Vladimir Jurowski hesitated over a narrative element that was in line with the then general anti-German Soviet propaganda, knowing how things were in Russia itself, including with regard to the composer himself. Is this staging not only a reflection of a general need to wash away the past, but also a reflection of it? Typical is that during the final monologue of Marta with the text: "If one day your voices fall silent, then we will perish", a text in Polish is projected in the set design (the same text?), against a background of a undulating ocean, the same undulating ocean we saw in the opening image. Interesting: by projecting the text that calls for not forgetting Auschwitz in Polish, justice is done to the 'Polishness' of the entire opera, the nationality of Marta and of the original author of the story, Zofia Posmysz, to the fact that Auschwitz is in Poland and to the original nationality of Weinberg. But at the same time, the message is in a sense also concealed; almost no one in the audience reads Polish. Does the director mean to say that we still don't want to hear the message? The text of the final monologue is of course simply visible in the surtitles. It should be said, moreover, that Die Passagierin has already been performed dozens of times in Germany and Austria, in large and small opera houses. There is no lack of interest and recognition. This second act is indeed set in Auschwitz, alternating between the barracks and the dining hall of the SS staff, during the preparations for a large celebration. Here too, the director refers rather indirectly to the concentration camp. On stage we see about fifteen tables arranged in width and towards the back, in a way that recalls the arrangement of the concrete blocks of Daniel Eisenman's Berlin Holocaust Memorial, but in this scene they are neatly covered with white tablecloths because of the coming dinner; the director lets the characters obscure the true nature of the location again, but in a sense does that himself too. Lisa, herself only 22 years old, tries to get the three years younger Marta under her control, or to involve her in SS practices, or out of pure sadism, or, as this staging seems to suggest, for erotic motives. She does this by offering to arrange meetings between Marta and her fiancé Tadeusz. However, both refuse. A meeting does take place when Tadeusz, who is a violinist, is given the task of coming to play the camp commander's favorite waltz music at the celebration. But while Weinberg writes the celebration scene largely in three-quarter time, he now has Tadeusz play the chaconne from Bach's partita in d minor. Upon which the assembled guests fall upon him, like the Furies in the Orpheus story, and murder him. A staging detail: when the crowd takes Tadeusz' violin, the violinist who plays the Chaconne (young star violinist Niek Baar) continues and finishes the Chaconne. In other words, art lives on (for a moment). Shortly before the final image, a character pushes a cart in front of him from behind the stage with a sixties-model television on which black and white film images are visible that look like images from Nazi camps, or perhaps they are images from the Polish film that was made based on Zofia Posmysz' original story. And then we do see - directly or indirectly - camp images. After the image of the ocean fades, a black curtain drops down. After the final measure of the first act, there was first a solemn silence, now loud applause immediately broke out. It is striking that conductor Adam Hickox has not looked in the direction of the audience from his entrance at the beginning to the end, and has thus, for example, also prevented the usual welcome applause at the beginning of the two acts, which strengthens the solemn character of the performance. Hickox also shows deep respect for the score, which he conducts beautifully and tightly, with a great sense of contrast between the satirical and lyrical passages, through a virtuously performed orchestra Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest, and a strong choir and soloists ensemble. Lisa is Jenny Carlstedt and Marta is Sylvia D'Eramo, both vocally and characterologically equal to their roles. Lisa has in a sense the traditional mezzo role of the older woman with the dubious character, Marta is the younger and more sympathetic lyrical soprano. The two male leading roles are also beautifully performed, tenor Nikolai Schukoff (Lohengrin at DNO in 2014) as the deliberately somewhat superficial and also in the libretto superficially kept husband of Lisa, and Gyula Oredt in the more characterful role of Tadeusz, the fiancé of Marta. The singers of the six smaller solo roles are all dressed the same as Marta. Dark black, as Marta's alter egos or as a squadron of angels of death. At the same time, this also eliminates the possibility of characterizing different characters. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBOfm83xgoM[/embed]

Die Passagierin can still be seen on 20, 23, 26 (matinee) and 29 April and on 2 May.

On 2 May the opera can be heard live from the Muziektheater on NPOKlassiek. On 4 May De Nationale Opera organizes as part of the Nationale Dodenherdenking as part of the Theater na de Dam programme in Studio Boekman Daderschap en Herinnering, with a panel discussion with Alette Smeulers, Stijn Reurs and Chris van der Heijden and songs by Weinberg performed by mezzo-soprano Eva Kroon and pianist Jan-Paul Grijpink. Starting at 21.00 hours

Basia Jaworski wrote her own review of a DVD of the 2010 performance in Bregenz.