The Passenger, an opera on the Auschwitz theme by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, is premiered tonight at the National Opera – Grand Theatre in Warsaw. It is a joint production with the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria, the English National Opera and Teatro Real in Madrid.

The libretto of the opera, by Alexander Medvedev, is based on a short story by the Polish writer, former German concentration camp prisoner, Zofia Posmysz. The staging is by David Poutney, the prominent British director and Artistic Director of the Bregenzer Festspiele, where the work was first presented earlier this year.

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. His music is currently undergoing a revival.

In later seasons, The Passenger is to be presented in London, Madrid, Berlin and New York. (mk)