In 1959, Zofia Posmysz was standing on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. There she heard a voice she had heard before, in Auschwitz. The voice belonged to a female camp guard from Auschwitz. She did not know what to do: approach her, speak to the woman, call the police. The incident became the inspiration for a novel: Pasażerka z kabiny 45 (Passenger from Cabin 45). In the novel, she reverses the roles and has the camp guard, Lisa, recognize the voice of a prisoner, Martha, while crossing from Europe to South America on a cruise ship. She is travelling with her husband, who has taken a new job there and knows nothing about her wartime past.

In Die Passagierin, the memory is never entirely reliable — it would later emerge that the voice heard on the Place de la Concorde could not have belonged to the camp guard, who had already died by then — but the power of the memory is undeniable. It sets Lisa's psychological decline and moral reckoning in motion. Based on the book, Mieczysław Weinberg composed an opera in 1968, but he never lived to see it actually reach the stage. Because of Soviet censorship, the work remained unperformed for decades (it rubbed rather too conspicuously against the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War). It was not until 2006 that a concert performance was given in Moscow, ten years after Weinberg's death; the first staged production followed only in 2010, at the Bregenz Festival. Die Passagierin is an opera about memory and repression that itself almost disappeared from history.

​In this co-production by Dutch National Opera and the Bayerische Staatsoper, director Tobias Kratzer adds a third layer of time to the already fragmented structure of the opera. Alongside the “present” aboard the ship and the past in Auschwitz, an elderly Lisa from the future appears, consumed by guilt. The three timelines existing simultaneously reinforce the central idea that Auschwitz cannot simply be confined to the past. Kratzer also chooses not to portray the flashbacks to Auschwitz literally as a concentration camp, but instead has them take place abstractly on the cruise ship itself. Kratzer has explained that a naturalistic reconstruction — with barbed wire, striped camp uniforms and recognizable iconography — today runs the risk of quickly descending into clichés, or even into a form of aestheticization of the Holocaust. By presenting Auschwitz not as a historical reconstruction but as a mental space, the past remains constantly present in the present. The ship therefore becomes not a safe distance from history, but a floating prison of memories. The focus is not on the set, but on the psychological mechanisms of repression and guilt.
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I particularly thought the additional, future version of Lisa worked very well on stage. At the end of the first act, she speaks text that originally belongs to the Lisa of the 1960s, but which acquires a completely new meaning here because of the new context (Walter is silent, because he is now ashes in an urn). Kratzer does this more often. He places existing text in a new context in order to create entirely new scenes. He directs with a very strong awareness of the libretto. As a result, even when he departs radically from the original in his staging, he never loses sight of the internal logic of the work. This is particularly evident in his Wagner productions, where he goes very far — his masterful Tannhäuser from Bayreuth left an indelible impression. But Wagner naturally already has an extensive performance history in which theater makers have subjected his operas to a wide range of artistic visions. That is certainly not the case with Die Passagierin, which has only been performed for twenty years and, given its sensitive subject matter, calls for a more cautious approach.

The transitions between the different layers of time are fluid, almost cinematic, and Weinberg's score fuses text, image and drama into an impressive whole. The music accentuates what is being sung and infallibly colours the emotional atmosphere of every scene: from the light, almost jazzy sounds at the beginning to the dark passages in which camp guards report on their “work” — the systematic murder of human beings — in an eerily matter-of-fact tone. The music functions as a psychological soundtrack: atmospheric, highly visual, and constantly creating emotional space rather than merely accompanying the action. This is music that reveals itself fully only in the theatre, as part of a complete production.
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Like the greatest ambassador for his work, Shostakovich, who also wrote film music, Weinberg's score strongly evokes film music. With all the associations that may entail. The ominous timpani at the beginning reminded me of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes from 1968 — with the same sense of existential menace and disorientation. Alongside these kinds of associations, which are entirely the listener's own, Weinberg incorporates quotations from other works. He does so in a completely organic way. Quotations from, among others, Britten's Peter Grimes, and especially Bach's Chaconne, flow naturally from the score and never feel forced. When Tadeusz, Marta's lover, is asked to play a waltz in the camp but instead begins playing Bach's Chaconne, music itself becomes an act of resistance — and immediately, a death sentence as well. After this performance, that Chaconne will never (ever?) sound quite the same again.

The opera ends without redemption. Marta addresses the future with the warning that “when your voices disappear, we will all perish”, while Lisa receives no form of absolution whatsoever. In Kratzer's version, this is made even more explicit when the elderly Lisa ultimately jumps overboard: not a dramatic final chord of repentance, but a last attempt to escape from a past that can no longer be avoided.

Die Passagierin, like films about the Holocaust, inevitably raises uncomfortable questions. To what extent can art bring the past back to life? Or does history, once transformed into a novel, a play or an opera, inevitably also become a form of aesthetic experience — and therefore of entertainment? Kratzer is aware of this danger and refuses refuses to “re-enact” Auschwitz through realistic imagery. The small television placed at the front of the stage at the end shows grainy black-and-white footage. It is barely recognizable, but one can guess what the images represent. It is the production's only realistic reference to the Holocaust.

Whether it is appropriate or not to use the Holocaust as the subject of an opera, Weinberg, who lost his entire family during the Second World War, believed it was. Art can prevent us from becoming desensitised; it can make us feel what is ground to dust between the millstones of history. And Die Passagierin reminds us of what opera is (also) capable of. Opera is not condemned to the realm of romantic entanglements, melodrama and beautiful suffering. It is precisely its excessiveness – the music, the voices, the theatricality and the emotional intensity – which, like no other art form, can forge a connection with intimate feelings, that makes it ideally suited to weighty subjects. No subject should be too serious, too painful or too difficult for opera. After all, opera need not be a soap opera blown up to orchestral proportions (consume Donizetti in moderation); it can be an art form in which history, memory and moral catastrophe, with emotional and intellectual power, can lead to a theatrical experience that brings about something essential and nourishes the mind. Die Passagierin offers no answers to the big questions that history poses to us (and which the present poses to us once again). It does not make the unimaginable entirely imaginable. It seeks the human dimension in a world that can be monstrous, and reminds us that the history to which she refers – despite a sublime theatrical experience – must never come to feel comfortable.

DIE PASSAGIERIN, Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam 24 April 2026 

Music: Mieczysław Weinberg
Libretto:  Alexander W. Medvedev

Conductor: Adam Hickox
Regie: Tobias Kratzer

Lisa  Jenny Carlstedt
Alte Lisa  Sibylle Maria Dordel
Walter  Nikolai Schukoff
Marta  Sylvia D’Eramo
Tadeusz  Gyula Orendt

In 2019, Goerne said he was giving himself another five years as a singer. It is now well past 2024, and fortunately he has gone back on that decision. But time is running out, and hearing Goerne perform live – with retirement on the horizon – is a real treat. In Milan, at the Teatro Dal Verme, Goerne gave a recital of songs by Franz Schubert in orchestral arrangements for baritone and ensemble (three cheers! – the CD ‘Schubert Revisited’ featuring these orchestral arrangements of the songs is firmly stuck in my CD player). Goerne has lost weight; he seems more fragile – I can no longer see him returning to a full-scale ‘Walküre’ Wotan – but as a lieder singer, and especially in Schubert, he remains a sensation.

Before the concert began, conductor Diego Fasolis asked the audience not to applaud between songs, but to wait until the end, as one would with a symphony. In the first two songs ('An Silvia' and 'Schäfers Klagelied'), the balance between the Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali and Goerne still felt somewhat precarious. The voice seemed to struggle with an overly intrusive orchestral presence – as if the singer were walking through a forest where the branches of the trees were being whipped into his face by a strong wind. Schubert’s intimacy was momentarily pushed into the background here. But from the third song ('Des Fischers Liebesglück') onwards, everything fell into place. The orchestral timbres and the polished timbre of Goerne’s voice began to interlock with remarkable precision. What followed was a deeply compelling Schubert, a seamless fusion of melody, text and tone colour, in which nothing was imposed and everything came about naturally.