MOT's 'Passenger' is a nightmare journey into the past
As operatic set-ups go, the opening of composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg and librettist Alexander Medvedev's "The Passenger" is extraordinary in how swiftly yet subtly it plunges a viewer into the nightmare of the Holocaust.
We meet German diplomat Walter Kretschmer and his wife, Liese, aboard an ocean liner bound for Brazil in the early 1960s. Liese blanches when she sees a woman she thinks is a former prisoner from Auschwitz, where Liese was once an SS overseer — except that the woman, Marta, was surely executed. The situation so unnerves Liese that she confesses her past to her husband for the first time.
What is so compelling about "The Passenger," which opened Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, is the way the opera proceeds on two parallel tracks from this startling beginning. The horror of life at the camp emerges in flashback with Marta and Liese at the center of the tale. These long scenes are juxtaposed, however, with scenes of the Liese-and-Walter crisis unfolding amid the gaiety of the ship, raising issues of the culpability of everyday Germans in the atrocities and the long shadow of original sin.
Combined with the stark and chilling beauty of Weinberg's music, a brilliantly conceived production with a two-tiered set — the barracks of the camp shown below and the comfort of the ship depicted above — and a seamless staging based on director David Pounteny's original 2010 production from Bregenz in Austria, the impact of "The Passenger" is devastating. In 20 years of opera-going in Detroit, I can't remember a more powerful night in the theater.
The subject cut deep for Weinberg, a Jew of Polish descent who fled to the Soviet Union to escape the Nazis but who lost family members to the Holocaust. The opera, based on a novel by Zofia Posmysz, was completed in 1968 but suppressed by Soviet authorities and not produced until 2010, well after the composer's death. Johan Engels designed the set, which contrasts the gleaming white of the ship with the dark, cramped barracks of the camp. They roll along portentous train tracks that echo the contrasting images of passengers on a luxury ship and the passengers on trains headed for the camps.
Revival director Rob Kearley channels Pounteny's original conception, which takes its cue from Weinberg's focused score and creates vivid visual pictures with a minimum of fuss and movement. MOT also opts for the multi-language version in which the singers are heard in German, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, English and Czech (with English surtitles projected above the stage). The multicultural quilt reminds you that the victims at Auschwitz came from across Europe and that it was not only Jews who perished. (Marta is Polish Catholic.)
The score is a marvel of sustained, high-wire tension. Weinberg slips in and out of various musical languages, from icy strings and bleak mallet percussion that create a Shostakovich-like tableau to fragmented, dissonant passages that rub up against atonality to outpourings of Eastern European folk songs. A morning roll call in the camp brings forth eerie tolling and clusters, and the orchestra and voices merge in music that seeps under your skin.
Later, back on the ship, Weinberg uses onstage cocktail jazz as a sardonic metaphor for how easy it becomes for Liese to justify her role in the SS. In an especially powerful scene late in the opera, a prisoner plays Bach's Chaconne in D Minor as an act of defiance in the midst of a concert for the German officers before being engulfed by the orchestra.
On Saturday, conductor Steven Mercurio did some of his finest work for MOT, reconciling the agitated rhythms and layered textures in the score into a fluid and nuanced performance by the orchestra that had both lyricism and bite. The cast, too, was exceptional from top to bottom. Mezzo-soprano Daveda Karanas brought vocal heft and a range of color to Liese, creating a three-dimensional, conflicted characterization.
As Marta, Adrienn Miksch's soprano reconciled power and beauty and was heartbreaking in the way her phrasing communicated her character's inner strength. Baritone Marian Pop brought similar qualities to Tadeusz, who reunites briefly in the camp with his former fiancée Marta. Another highlight was Anna Gorbachyova's Katja, a prisoner who sings a soaring Russian folk song. In the rather thankless role of Walter, David Danholt matched well with Karanas' Liese. In the end, however, it was not a single individual who made the greatest impression but rather the organic consistency, expressiveness and emotional punch of the entire production.
Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459. mstryker@freepress.com
'The Passenger'
Four stars
out of four stars
Presented by Michigan Opera Theatre
Repeat performances at 7:30 p.m. Sat. and 2:30 p.m. Sun.
Detroit Opera House, 1526 Broadway
313-237-7464.
$29-$149.