Weinberg’s THE PASSENGER – opera and Auschwitz

So it’s Saturday night, let’s head out to an Auschwitz Opera!
As entertainment goes, it’s not an easy sell. The ENO shut down their top two tiers last night so we were directed to the best seats in the Dress Circle. And the opera, The Passenger by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, was terrific.
Weinberg’s music was beloved of Shostakovich and this was deemed his masterpiece. Written in 1967 it’s only recently been produced.
The music had its own idiom. Mix Richard Strauss and Alban Berg, steep them in band music and folk song, and maybe that’s what this is like. It’s a fairly gentle piece, largely an opera for the female voice so the orchestra tends to support rather than dominate.
The ENO generally give the best production in town. The scale of the Colosseum is more intimate than the grander houses so voices carry, singing is exemplary, but since all work is performed in English much more focus is given to relaying the meaning through the drama. This is real theatre, not just superstars with mega-voices jetted in to an ongoing show. The commitment to putting on such a work is subsidized opera at its best.
Some critics are troubled by an opera based on Auschwitz (this was taken from a novel written by a survivor. Weinberg fled East from Warsaw and all his family perished). I was spurred to go since my new novel picks up the same themes: music, the Holocaust and Auschwitz. Parallel themes were moving. Should the creative imagination take the Holocaust as subject? Who’s to say. It came in and took me. I read, visit, speak with folk, study, do my best to honour the obligation. Weinberg and his librettist worked for years on this opera with no reward in their lifetime. You do what you have to do. The work is one of the finest productions of the human spirit that has a life of its own.