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“Never again is now,” declares a huge banner outside Munich’s National Theatre. The German drive to atone for the Holocaust puts the nation in an awkward position as both antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state rise; cultural institutions are under pressure to denounce any such criticism. In this context, Die Passagierin (The Passenger) is a powder keg.
Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera is based on The Passenger from Cabin 45, an autobiographical radio play by Polish writer Zofia Posmysz. She survived Auschwitz, and her play, which went on to become a television drama, a feature film, a novel and an opera, is an examination of her experiences there. Weinberg, a student of Shostakovich, was himself a Polish Jew whose entire family were murdered by the Nazis. He had his own problems as a Jewish artist in the Soviet Union; though he finished the opera in 1968, it was not performed until 2006, a decade after his death. (Posmysz died in August 2022.) Tobias Kratzer’s new production of Die Passagierin for Bavarian State Opera is at once a homage to the extraordinary author and an exploration of the liberty afforded by her absence.
Together with conductor Vladimir Jurowski, Kratzer has radically edited Die Passagierin, cutting out huge swathes of the opera’s concentration camp scenes and deleting entire characters — acts which they admit would have been impossible were Posmysz still with us. The problem, as Kratzer explained in interviews before Sunday’s premiere, is that a literal representation of Auschwitz, with striped uniforms and shaven heads, skates perilously close to kitsch in today’s context, while the figure of righteous communist prisoner Katya, as he sees it, was merely an interpolation created by Weinberg in an unsuccessful attempt to appease Soviet censors.
Kratzer’s new, pared-down version of the opera maintains Weinberg’s setting of a cruise liner on which former SS prison guard Lisa is faced with a passenger who could be Marta, the prisoner whom she “helped” and brutalised in Auschwitz. But he adds a third layer, in which Lisa appears as an old woman today, clutching the ashes of husband Walter in an urn, watching with exaggerated horror as the action unfolds — like Rose in Titanic. Marta appears as a ghostly figure in a black dress, her fellow inmates all doubles of herself, so that the Auschwitz scenes become shadows of dreadful memory, never explicit.
And it works. Jurowski and Kratzer have created a lean, contemporary Passagierin, expressive in its ambiguity, taut in form, superbly executed. Kratzer can magic a crowd on to or off the stage in a heartbeat, he can move bodies through space with eloquence; he knows his craft.
Jurowski breathes meaning into every note and keeps his excellent musicians completely committed throughout. Elena Tsallagova brings the house down in the title role, with a performance of impassioned, heart-rending innocence. Sophie Koch tackles the ambivalent figure of Lisa with intelligence and nuance; Charles Workman communicates the moral weaknesses of her husband Walter with chilling conviction; Jacques Imbrailo makes a wonderfully heroic Tadeusz.
Should today’s interpreters have the liberty to chop and change a canonic opera? Munich’s Passagierin does not really answer this question, but it makes a strong case.
★★★★☆
To July 16, staatsoper.de
