Revival of the stirring opera “The Passenger” by Mieczysław Weinberg
Following the extremely successful series of performances in 2019 and the production’s nomination for the German Theater Prize, “The Passenger” by Mieczysław Weinberg – in a production by General Director Kay Kuntze – was revived for three performances in April 2023, under the musical direction of GMD Ruben Gazarian.
Weinberg’s mentor Dmitri Shostakovich called this opera a “hymn to humanity”.
About the opera: In 1960, the German diplomat Walter Kretschmar and his wife Lisa board an ocean liner that is to take them to South America. During a walk on deck, Lisa is suddenly overcome with terror as she thinks she recognizes Martha, a former Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, in another passenger. Lisa had once worked there as a guard. She is seized by bad memories, while Walter knows nothing of his wife’s dark past. The opera is about guilt and the impossibility of suppressing it, but also about the responsibility of subsequent generations to keep the memory of the darkest chapter in German history alive. At the same time, it is about the timeless power of love, humanity and music.
