Source: bregenzerfestspiele.com

"The Passenger", an opera on an Auschwitz theme by Mieczyslaw Weinberg had its world premiere last night at the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria, one of Europe’s major summer music festivals.

Its libretto, by Alexander Medvedev, is based on a short story by the Polish writer and former German concentration camp prisoner, Zofia Posmysz.

The opera's production is the work of David Poutney, a prominent British director and Artistic Director of the Bregenz Festspiele. Daily productions are scheduled until the end of the month.

The staging of "The Passenger" is a co-production with the National Opera in Warsaw, where it will move in October. In later seasons, it is to be presented in London, Madrid, Berlin and New York.

"The Passenger" was composed in 1968. It is set on an ocean liner en route from Europe to South America in the late 1950s and in the Auschwitz camp in 1943 and 1944.

One of the passengers on board is Lisa, the wife of a German diplomat on his way to Brazil. It turns out that Lisa was formerly an SS warden in Auschwitz. To her horror one of the fellow passengers is the spitting image of Marta, a Polish prisoner at the camp whom Lisa had tried to befriend while she was a warden there.

Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg spent the first two decades of his life in Poland. In 1939, he fled from the Nazis eastwards, eventually settling in Moscow, where he lived till his death in 1996, at the age of 77.

Weinberg's music is currently undergoing a revival of interest. The programme of the Bregenz festival includes as many as five concerts featuring his works and a symposium devoted to his life and music. The writer Zofia Posmysz, now 87, is expected to attend. (mk/jb)

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