“The Passenger” will make its belated arrival in New York this summer, when the Lincoln Center Festival and the Park Avenue Armory present Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1968 opera about the Holocaust, which was not performed during his lifetime.
Weinberg, a Jewish composer whose family was killed in the Holocaust, fled his native Poland in 1939 for the Soviet Union, where he became a protégé of Shostakovich, but suffered under Stalin. His opera “The Passenger” — based on 1959 radio play by Zofia Posmysz, an Auschwitz survivor — is set on a cruise ship in the 1950s, where a former Nazi SS officer thinks that she has recognized a fellow passenger as one of her former Auschwitz prisoners.
Shostakovich praised “The Passenger,” but it was not performed during the lifetime of Weinberg, who died in 1996. It did not receive a fully staged production until 2010, when it was presented in Bregenz, Austria, in a production by David Pountney. The opera, produced by several European companies, will receive its American premiere at Houston Grand Opera in January. In July, the opera — performed by Houston Grand Opera and conducted by Patrick Summers — will come to New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.
Nigel Redden, the director of the festival, said that with “The Passenger” the festival would continue its record of presenting rarely performed modern and contemporary works.
“The exciting thing for me is this discovery of 20th-century and 21st-century works that would not otherwise be heard,’’ he said in an interview. “It’s enormously important for New York, as a cultural center, to have access to this.”
Mr. Redden said that Mr. Pountney — whose production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera “Die Soldaten” was performed at the Park Avenue Armory in 2008 — told him that he had been thinking of the armory when he conceived of the multilevel set used in “The Passenger.”