The hell of the holocaust shattered the joy of Madrid’s Holy Week
“And we descended into Hell”. That is where Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s holocaust opera, The Passenger, takes all who see it. The hell of Auschwitz. Last Sunday’s performance at Teatro Real, Madrid, coincided with the beginning of Holy Week. Palm Sunday. Jubilation.
Tempered by the approach of Good Friday’s imminent death of Christ and his descent into hell, passion was already hanging heavily in Madrid’s air. The 2000 year read across to 1940s Germany was unavoidable.
The Passenger’s libretto is based on an autobiographical account of holocaust survivor, Zofia Posmysz, who died in Poland fifteen days short of her 100th birthday on 8 August 2022. A lady of total grace, dignity, and resolution.
The original play, The Passenger from Cabin 45 was broadcast in 1958, followed by publication of a novella, The Passenger, in 1962. A film by Andrzej Munk, a post-Stalinist Polish film director, was completed posthumously in 1962.
Weinberg’s opera – the composer exchanged the misery of 1939 Germany for the not much better Soviet Union – was written in 1968, for performance at Moscow’s Bolshoi. And immediately suppressed by the Soviet authorities. The libretto, mostly true to the book, is by Alexander Medvedev, who worked for decades with Weinberg and Shostakovich.
Sir David Pountney’s production at the Bregenz Festival in 2006 marked the first full staging of the work. It was premiered at Teatro Real in 2020. Pountney, whose career has spanned more than half a century, specialises in the “difficult” territory of the repertory. He was Director of Productions at Scottish Opera from 1982 to 1993 and provided the staple diet that fed my operatic interest.
His interpretation offers no compromise with harsh reality. The audience is swept into the almost indescribable world of the notorious death camp.
Pountney splits the scene horizontally, separating the action between a pristine-white liner and the filthy underworld camp below. Scene changes are effected by flatbed rail wagons being hefted in and out on tracks by prisoners. Sometimes they are piled high with belongings and clothes, stripped from disembarking prisoners.
Horror lurked in every detail. Day-to-day mental and physical cruelty, often mundane, but crafted in callousness, was bitterly illuminated by occasional flashes of false hope temptingly proffered by demonic SS custodians.
Why a read across to a Christian Good Friday hell? The “hell”, into which Christ descended after his death on the cross, as referenced in The Apostles Creed and the Christian Catechism is the abode of the dead, righteous and not so righteous, in which souls dwell awaiting the toughest cut of destiny. Judgement.
Extending the metaphor to The Passenger, Auschwitz prisoners’ rites of passage from their living hell was death, or occasionally, and often for banal, random reasons, survival. Leaving Auschwitz alive was almost as miraculous as the Easter resurrection.
Modern Spain remains swathed in religious observation. Madrid on a sunny Palm Sunday was awash with spontaneous outbreaks of devotion. Streets were enthusiastically cordoned off by the Guardia Civil, sniffing Pascal overtime. Donkeys led parades awash with palm leaves. Not the tiny slivers doled out in churches in the UK. Four-foot bendy seed-bearing fronds blowing chaotically in the spring breeze.
In Philip III’s magnificent Plaza Mayor a huge, gilded float carrying a life-sized donkey, mounted by a plaster-cast Christ Triumphans, embarked shakily. Followed by a retinue of important but difficult to identify saintly statues, the incongruous edifice tottered alarmingly across the huge square, followed by a long procession, including a brass band of local worthies. Practice sessions had clearly not been a priority.
No matter. Who could question the religious fervour? They all seemed to be playing from different scores anyway. The Jesus Oompah Band on an Easter outing.
Leaving the plaza and entering the nearby sanctuary of Teatro Real, the audience was confronted with a grey, tattered curtain depicting in dark tonal abstract the mountainous pile of belongings stripped from concentration camp inmates on arrival.
No doubt where we were headed. Two ominous rail tracks jutted out from below the curtain over the orchestra pit, with solid buffers. Iconic Auschwitz symbol. The end of the line.
The action starts in the early 1960s. Aboard a classy ocean liner from Germany bound for Brazil. Walter and Lisa are passengers. They have been married for fifteen years. Walter is a German diplomat en route to a new posting. Unknown to him, Lisa is a former SS overseer in Auschwitz. That wasn’t in her CV. No one asked awkward questions about the past in post-war Germany.
Lisa recognises a veiled woman passenger travelling on her own as Marta, a camp prisoner she had tried to bend to her will. She thought Marta was dead. No one escaped ‘the black wall of death’.
Lisa’s ghosts haunt her. She is terrified of being exposed as a war criminal. The action moves to Auschwitz, her role as an overseer, and the daily horrors of prison camp life. There follows a precis. The full synopsis is available here.
Marta’s fiancé, Tadeusz is a fellow prisoner in the camp and a violinist. The commandant demands that a prisoner play his favourite waltz at a camp concert. Tadeusz is chosen. He goes to collect a violin from the female barracks, violating co-mingling rules because no officer will be seen by prisoners carrying a sissy violin through the camp. Encounter with Marta.
Lisa discovers them and tries to bend both to her will, offering another meeting, which Tadeusz refuses. Lisa’s objective is to find compliant prisoners to do her dirty work. Tadeusz and Marta won’t play ball.
Back on the liner Walter, who seems more concerned about the impact of a war crime scandal on his career – he predicts a headline “Diplomat resigns before taking up post” – than the fate of his wife, has, with Lisa, resolved to brazen it out. Their resolution falls apart when the supposed Marta approaches and the ship’s orchestra breaks into the “Kommandant’s Waltz”. Lisa recognises it at once.
Flash to the final scene in the camp, the moral core of the opera. As the climax approaches – Tadeusz’ solo violin recital in front of the Kommandant – one of the trucks arrives loaded with battered violin cases. Stripping the inmates of physical dignity was not enough. They were stripped of musical culture, too. Their klezmer tradition.
The Nazis staged an exhibition of degenerate music in Dusseldorf in 1938, a year after the better-known degenerate art show in Munich. Joseph Goebbels’ “music of decay” included Jewish traditional klezmer music of Central and Eastern Europe’s Ashkenazy Jewish community. The haunting sound was made familiar by the musical, Fiddler on the Roof. It is characterised by the mournful, swooping elision of intervals.
The Kommandant and his apparatchiks are settling in for a performance of his waltz. Tadeusz has been commandeered. In a moment of inspired Pountney staging Tadeusz stands facing his tormentors bathed in light and plays. What? This is not the expected waltz. Bach’s Chaconne rings out defiantly.
The original score has the orchestra begin the Chaconne. Pountney does something more dramatic. He starts the piece as Tadeusz’s solo, played onstage. The spot-lit violinist, necessarily a Tadeusz stand-in, has his back to the audience and the intensity of his playing is slowly chorused by the violins in the pit.
This is astonishing. To disobey is certain death. Herein lies the stroke of Weinberg’s genius. It would have been low-hanging fruit to taunt the Kommandant with a klezmer performance. But that the brutality and ignorance of Nazism is confronted by a Jewish prisoner honouring the summit of German 18th century cultural achievement, is sensationally moving.
Tadeusz throws Bach in the boorish Kommandant’s face. For his boldness he is dragged off to the execution he knew was inevitable.
Weinberg’s music, hugely influenced by long collaboration with his colleague Dmitri Shostakovich, exudes power. Although not of the atonal school Weinberg stretches tonality to the point of rupture. The score is brutal. As I peered into the orchestra pit I counted no fewer than eight percussionists.
Some of their instruments looked as though they came from a torture chamber. Especially a wooden clapper. Two long lengths of wood hinged at one end which issued an alarming whipcrack sound when slammed shut. Which happened regularly. Ouch!
Subtle folk references are woven into the score and at poignant moments lyricism contrasts sharply with the generally harsh soundscape. Certainly, Weinberg has his own voice.
In the pit Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytè-Tyla sported a traditional German braided hairstyle, eerily mimicking Lisa, the overseer. Whose side was she on? Well, ours. She gave a blistering rendering of the complex score. The Teatro Real orchestra was up to every challenge.
The full cast is to be found here. Standouts were Amanda Majeski, who sang Marta; Davida Karanas, Lisa; and Gyula Orendt, Tadeusz.
Majeski, an American soprano, delivered a devastatingly dignified portrayal of Marta.
Karanas, a Greek American mezzo soprano, used her powerful voice to inject huge menace into Lisa’s confrontations with the camp inmates. Her duets with Marta, as she tried to resolve her conflicted emotions – which would win? Control or clemency? – were theatrical tours de force.
Orendt, a Hungarian Romanian baritone encounters that ‘make or break’ moment in the opera when he must accept or reject Lisa’s offer of another illicit meeting with his fiancé Marta. Tadeusz’s moral struggle welled up in Orendt’s voice. The audience was left on a cliff edge of uncertainty until Tadeusz resoundingly rejected the easy way out.
To my astonishment at curtain call, there was Pountney taking his bow. So many revivals lack the guiding hand of the original’s director. Revival directors are the norm. But, not in Spain. The mutton-chopped Pountney’s appearance was greeted with a suitably satisfying roar from the packed house.
The opera ends with a moving epilogue. Marta sits front of stage and engages the audience directly. Now, she is an elderly lady, much like Zofia Posmyz. In fact, she is Zofia Posmyz, speaking to us directly. She has survived. Singing a poignant solo recounting her memories she enjoins the audience never to forget her story. We do. All too frequently.
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