Die Passagierin

In the organizer's words:

Opera in two acts by Mieczysław Weinberg

I Libretto by Alexander Medvedev after Zofia Posmysz

Multilingual with German surtitles

Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the German diplomat Walter and his wife Lisa travel on a ship from Europe to Brazil, where he is to take up a new post. Everything seems peaceful until Lisa unexpectedly notices a passenger on board who reminds her of Marta, a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp where she worked as a guard. Lisa has never told her husband about this past and has suppressed it as much as possible. Now, however, images of her own entanglement and guilt emerge; the ship voyage leads inexorably into her own abysses.

In her novel "The Passenger", Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmyz deals with autobiographical experiences. Mieczysław Weinberg, deeply moved by the story, composed an opera based on the material in 1968, which was never performed during his lifetime and was first staged in 2010. The work, which opposes with all its strength the forgetting of the civilizational rupture, is preceded by a quote from the poet Paul Éluard as a motto: "When the echo of your voices fades, we perish."