Opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, libretto by Alexander Medwedew based on Zofia Posmysz‘s novella with the same title. Sung in German and Russian with German surtitles.

Premiere on 21 July 2009 - 7.30 p.m., Festival Opera House

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera The Passenger/Die Passagierin will be staged at the Festival Opera House in 2010. This opera by the Polish composer is based on a novel with the same title by the Polish Holocaust survivor Zofia Posmysz. Completed in 1968, the opera was first performed in 2006 in a semi-staged concert in Moscow. 

The Passenger is set partly on an ocean liner en route from Europe to South America in the late 1950s, and partly in the concentration camp Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. One of the passengers on board is Lisa, the wife of a German diplomat who is on his way to Brazil in order to take up a new post. It turns out that Lisa was formerly an SS warden in Auschwitz. To her horror one of her fellow passengers is the spitting image of Marta, a Polish prisoner at the camp whom Lisa had tried to befriend while she was a warden there.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who was born into Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Moscow in 1996, is regarded as the most independent-minded and important of all of Shostakovich’s followers. In 1939 he fled from the Nazis from Warsaw to Minsk; his parents and his sister were killed. In 1943 Weinberg moved to Moscow, where he worked as a composer and pianist, completing a vast quantity of music including scores for some of the Soviet Union’s most famous films and beloved children’s cartoons.

Further performances
26 July - 7.30 p.m.
28 July - 7.30 p.m.
31 July - 11.00 a.m.

Introductory talk in the Festival Theatre will be start one hour before performance

A supplement of EUR 25 is to be paid on July 21 (category 1-3)