2024-03-12 18:56:47
Precisely on that Oscar night, when Jonathan Glazer’s oppressive film about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß was not only awarded as the best foreign contribution, but also for its magnificently intelligent and horrifying soundtrack, which makes one feel what is happening behind the wall of the… Höß’schen Garten, Mieczysław Weinberg’s Auschwitz music theater “The Passenger” had its premiere at the Munich State Opera. There, too, something happens in Tobias scratch’s careful, clever direction not showed what is constantly present on the stage and in the minds of the packed audience.
Although this astonishing work based on the autobiographical novel “Pasażerka” by the Polish resistance fighter Zofia Posmysz was completed in 1968, its concert premiere only took place in Moscow in 2006, ten years after Weinberg’s death. David Pountney brought the piece to the stage for the first time four years later in Bregenz.
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Pountney’s production has now been shown in Warsaw, London, Houston, New York, Chicago and Miami. And Zofia Posmysz, who was already 87 years old in 2010, usually bowed at the end. She only died in 2022, shortly before her 99th birthday, in a hospice in Auschwitz.
Without barbed wire, prisoner clothing, SS uniforms
The German premiere of “Passagierin”, this great opera that is so important in contemporary history, took place in Karlsruhe in 2013. The piece was only put on the program of a major German opera house in 2015 – in Frankfurt. So now the work came to the stage for the first time without Zofia Posmysz’s presence. After the death of the last contemporary witness, it is ready to enter a more self-sufficient phase of interpretation.
So Vladimir Jurowski, the general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, who was extremely committed to the sound, shortened Weinberg’s virtuoso eclectic tone between percussion rumbles and jazz dance music, hard string attacks, alienated waltzes and Bach partita, which was inserted at the time as a contemporary historical concession, but was irrelevant for a merciful judgment by the censors The introduction of a positively portrayed communist as one of the camp inmates is obvious.
Mieczyslaw Weinbergs 22. Sinfonie
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And Tobias scratch tries to show an Auschwitz opera without barbed wire, prisoner clothing, bald heads, SS uniforms and German Shepherds. We all have these images in our heads, just like the characters on stage. The setting shouldn’t be kitsch: a fine line on which this outrageous opera always balances precariously.
Lost in the ocean
In Munich, of course, in the “capital of the movement”, where the music college is located in the old “Führerbau”, it is now primarily about memory, about a conscience that torments or is ignored. And Zofia Posmysz’s metaphor of a passenger liner lost in the deep ocean has become an even stronger symbol of this.
Scratcher’s regular designer Rainer Sellmaier has congenially designed a cage-like wall directly on the ramp, which quickly turns out to be 15 cabins on three decks of one of the modern human dungeons of package tourism. There, their temporary residents usually stand isolated on the balconies and enjoy the sea.
In the human dungeon of package tourism
Source: BAVARIAN STATE SOPER/Wilfried Hösl
Only the lounge chair seats and an American flag as a towel are striped. In the middle, of course, there is an old woman waiting (Sybille Maria Dordel expressively plays her silently) who clings to an urn and suddenly becomes frightened.
In the original libretto we experience how the former concentration camp guard Lisa, who is on the ship with her husband Walter to his ambassadorial post in Brazil, suddenly believes that she recognizes a passenger as the prisoner Martha, who had long been thought dead, with whom she had a special relationship in Auschwitz relationship connected. But that didn’t stop her from watching her rebellious fiancé Tadeusz being beaten up and taken away to be killed. She complains self-pityingly about the “duty” she has fulfilled.
Whether this woman is Martha remains in limbo; memory and reality mix like the musical patchwork of this score. In the case of Schock, it is now the old Lisa who can no longer control her new memories on the ship that is supposed to bring her husband’s ashes back to Germany. The levels mix for a third time between today, the 1950s and the concentration camp experiences.
German, Polish, Yiddish, Czech
And the direction alienates the voices of those who are no longer alive from the cabins by suddenly having tourists croaking Nazi orders in a very matter-of-fact way. They reveal their inner life, where sometimes guards lurk, sometimes prisoners hold their ground: in Lisa’s cabin, her middle-aged alter ego, the doubting, troubled, plaintive Sophie Koch and her husband, the first reassuring, then horrified Charles Workman.
In Martha’s cabin, from which for a long time you could only hear her soprano-clear voice, you can now see the magnificently heartfelt but strong Elena Tsallagova with four fellow sufferers dressed in black. The singing is in German, Polish, Yiddish and Czech.
At the end of the first act, old Martha can’t take it anymore: she jumps into the water and floats towards an abyss in Manuel Braun’s video. And seems to experience the second act as a kind of near-death experience. Now that we’re actually heading to Auschwitz, we experience a captain’s dinner – a huge, black dining room, with a uniform row of white-covered tables. The perpetrators, who have mutated into vacationers in fifties party dresses, can no longer turn their crimes under this; On top of them lie their former victims as a warning.
Here Sophie Koch wanders through the rows of chairs, increasingly lost. She wants pity (“They hated us all”), but shows raw brutality when she hits Martha with a violin bow as a striking tool and forces her to sleep with her doomed Tadeusz (also spellbound at the moment: Jacques Imbrallo).
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We hear everything, see little. In addition to the great ensemble, which plays as simply as it does intensely, with its many small, concise roles, Weinberg’s polystylistic music develops a captivating effect between forlornness, melancholy, glaring defiance and lament, concrete, film music-like situational intimation and abstract emotion. Vladimir Jurowski controls this relentlessly. He reinforces the contrasts, deliberately highlights the many quotations and thus rounds off the individuality of this score. She seems to be asking listeners to fill in the gaps in their memories.
At the end, shortly before the curtain comes down for the last time, almost soberly, Sophie Koch sits silently in front of a small black and white television from which real concentration camp images flicker, barely recognizable but warningly visible. The horror of yesterday, which must still be present today, is not minimized and processed in an aesthetically abstract way on this nightmare ship of the “Passenger”, as well as in the commander’s house in “The Zone of Interest”. It hits deep again. Very.
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