With the collapse of the USSR, all the major publishing houses that had monopolized music publishing in the Soviet Union collapsed or were bought out. In the case of the work of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996), a Russian-Polish composer who was persecuted by the Nazis as a Jew and censored and imprisoned in the USSR, only a small part was free of rights, and that is how he found The passenger is the historic English stage director David Pountney, who revolutionized opera in the seventies with the English National Opera while Covent Garden was becoming obsolete.
“I received only a couple of sheets with a title: 'Opera about Auschwitz by a friend of Shostakovich.' When Googling the composer I found his gigantic production: 17 string quartets, 22 symphonies, 7 operas...”, explains Pountney. Never before had The Passenger been staged, based on the novel by the Polish Zofia Posmysz (1962) about a former SS commander in Auschwitz who suffers a flashback traveling by boat (a place from which one cannot escape), because she believes she has seen one of his victims on board. Pountney decided to do it at the Bregenz festival (Austria). That was only 14 years ago.
That the author and the composer were protagonists in Nazism adds authenticity to the work. They are ambassadors of the great tragedy of the 20th century. Friday's premiere at the Real, with the Finnish baton Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla on the podium, caused a sensation among the audience. In the audience, Gustavo Dudamel followed the performance, eager to learn the painful and very original score. A piece that is difficult to execute, especially vocally, but easy and overwhelming to listen to. El Real dedicates its eight functions to the memory of Gerard Mortier when, this coming week, it marks a decade since his death.
