The Passenger-opera review
March 2, 2015
Opera Review
March 1, 2015
The Passenger
by Betty Mohr
It was an epic carnage of historic proportion that should never be forgotten. And the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with its presentation of The Passenger, has courageously not forgotten. The opera, which centers on the Holocaust, is the most significant of this year’s Lyric season—and maybe of any of its seasons.
One can’t help but contrast The Passenger with New York Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of The Death of Klinghoffer. That opera presented the story of the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner, the Achille Lauro. It offered a moral equivalence between the 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Jewish American and the PLO terrorist who shot him and threw him overboard. (To read more on Klinghoffer, click here.)
The opera, composed by John Adams, attempts to give credence to the terrorist’s grievance—as though the atrocity could be rationalized. Unlike the anti-Semitic Klinghoffer opera, which glorified terrorism, The Passenger takes a moral stand
Based on Zofia Posmysz’s (a survivor of Auschwitz) novel, The Passenger is composed by Miecyzslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) with a libretto by Alexander Medvedev (1927-2010). Weinberg, a Polish Jew, lost his mother, father, and sister in the Nazi totalitarian drive to slaughter every Jew in Europe. He escaped to Russia at the beginning of World War II and wrote The Passenger in 1968. But he was prevented from having it performed by the Jew-hating Marxist Soviet Regime.
The opera was discovered by director David Pountney, who in 2010 staged The Passenger at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. The opera was also mounted in Warsaw, Poland, Madrid, Spain, London, England, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Houston, Texas. Now Pountney stages it at the Lyric in an exquisite, subtle, and heartrending new-to-Chicago production.
March 1, 2015
The Passenger
by Betty Mohr
It was an epic carnage of historic proportion that should never be forgotten. And the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with its presentation of The Passenger, has courageously not forgotten. The opera, which centers on the Holocaust, is the most significant of this year’s Lyric season—and maybe of any of its seasons.
One can’t help but contrast The Passenger with New York Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of The Death of Klinghoffer. That opera presented the story of the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner, the Achille Lauro. It offered a moral equivalence between the 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Jewish American and the PLO terrorist who shot him and threw him overboard. (To read more on Klinghoffer, click here.)
The opera, composed by John Adams, attempts to give credence to the terrorist’s grievance—as though the atrocity could be rationalized. Unlike the anti-Semitic Klinghoffer opera, which glorified terrorism, The Passenger takes a moral stand
Based on Zofia Posmysz’s (a survivor of Auschwitz) novel, The Passenger is composed by Miecyzslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) with a libretto by Alexander Medvedev (1927-2010). Weinberg, a Polish Jew, lost his mother, father, and sister in the Nazi totalitarian drive to slaughter every Jew in Europe. He escaped to Russia at the beginning of World War II and wrote The Passenger in 1968. But he was prevented from having it performed by the Jew-hating Marxist Soviet Regime.
The opera was discovered by director David Pountney, who in 2010 staged The Passenger at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. The opera was also mounted in Warsaw, Poland, Madrid, Spain, London, England, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Houston, Texas. Now Pountney stages it at the Lyric in an exquisite, subtle, and heartrending new-to-Chicago production.
It begins on board a luxurious ocean liner as Walter, a German diplomat (velvety tenor Brandon Jovanovich) and his wife, Liese (rich mezzo-soprano Daveda Karanas’s) are on their way to Brazil for Walter’s new post. It is 1960 and everything is looking up for the couple until Liese spots a woman who reminds her of Marta (sparkling soprano Amanda Majeski), a Nazi- concentration inmate.
Walter is not aware that his wife was previously an SS death-camp warden. When he finds out, he’s horrified, but not because of the evil in which his wife took part, but because it could ruin his career. And Liese, unrepentant, has rationalized her past, persuading herself that she actually helped the incarcerated Jewish woman. But her fear of discovering that the passenger is really the Jewish prisoner reveals Liese’s deep-seated, unacknowledged guilt. She believes that if she can forget the past, then it never happened.
The scenic design of the opera by Johan Engles is extraordinary and powerful. The two-tier set features a luminous, white ship’s deck on top, and a dark, deadly camp below (Fabrice Kabour’s lighting conveys the mood of the two worlds to emotional perfection).
While we see the passengers on the ship dressed immaculately in white, the inmates below have had their heads shaved and are imprisoned in grisly striped uniforms (costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca).
The Nazi prisoners sing in the languages of their nationalities so that we hear Polish, Czech, English, Yiddish, French, and German as the opera continues to a heart-piercing moment in which Tadeusz (baritone Joshua Hopkins), Marta’s lover, is ordered to play the Nazi commander’s favorite waltz. In a heroic act of defiance, Tadeusz plays Bach instead. The jackbooted thugs rip his violin from his hands, trash it, and drag him off to certain death.
Walter is not aware that his wife was previously an SS death-camp warden. When he finds out, he’s horrified, but not because of the evil in which his wife took part, but because it could ruin his career. And Liese, unrepentant, has rationalized her past, persuading herself that she actually helped the incarcerated Jewish woman. But her fear of discovering that the passenger is really the Jewish prisoner reveals Liese’s deep-seated, unacknowledged guilt. She believes that if she can forget the past, then it never happened.
The scenic design of the opera by Johan Engles is extraordinary and powerful. The two-tier set features a luminous, white ship’s deck on top, and a dark, deadly camp below (Fabrice Kabour’s lighting conveys the mood of the two worlds to emotional perfection).
While we see the passengers on the ship dressed immaculately in white, the inmates below have had their heads shaved and are imprisoned in grisly striped uniforms (costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca).
The Nazi prisoners sing in the languages of their nationalities so that we hear Polish, Czech, English, Yiddish, French, and German as the opera continues to a heart-piercing moment in which Tadeusz (baritone Joshua Hopkins), Marta’s lover, is ordered to play the Nazi commander’s favorite waltz. In a heroic act of defiance, Tadeusz plays Bach instead. The jackbooted thugs rip his violin from his hands, trash it, and drag him off to certain death.
Weinberg’s musical score, under Sir Andrew Davis’s masterful baton (everything Davis touches is golden) and the Lyric Orchestra, has moments that sound like the plaintive cry of soul-searing profound sorrow, and times when the music has a life-affirming melody that conveys a sense of human dignity in the face of brutal depravity and horror.
The Passenger would have been an important work in any year after the Nazi savagery—but now in the midst of the rampant Jew hatred exploding across Europe—a Europe that is beginning to look a lot like the landscape of Hitler’s 1930s, The Passenger is incredibly timely.
Bravo to Anthony Freud, Lyric’s general director, for selecting this powerful, poignant, and passionate work as the last opera of the Lyric season.
The Passenger
When: Through March 15, 2015
Where: Lyric Opera at the Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Dr., Chicago
Tickets: $39-$249
Information: Call 312.827.5600 or visit www.lyricopera.org
The Passenger would have been an important work in any year after the Nazi savagery—but now in the midst of the rampant Jew hatred exploding across Europe—a Europe that is beginning to look a lot like the landscape of Hitler’s 1930s, The Passenger is incredibly timely.
Bravo to Anthony Freud, Lyric’s general director, for selecting this powerful, poignant, and passionate work as the last opera of the Lyric season.
The Passenger
When: Through March 15, 2015
Where: Lyric Opera at the Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Dr., Chicago
Tickets: $39-$249
Information: Call 312.827.5600 or visit www.lyricopera.org
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