Singer

The opera was written by the composer two months before he died. The libretto, based on biography of the Roman emperor Titus, shows the dilemmas of the ruler - an internal tear between the duty resulting from the function performed and personal beliefs and feelings.

The performance was prepared by Maja Kleczewska, an appreciated and award-winning theater director who in her stagings is not afraid to pose difficult, and sometimes uncomfortable, questions about the present.

EPSG:4326

The Clemency Of Titus

Baltic Opera House

An opera about Auschwitz seemed unimaginable. And yet, it did. It was composed by Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish-Jewish Varsovian who lost his family in the camp and of whom the opera's director, David Pountney, said that he "spent his life creating music in memory of his lost loved ones." Weinberg was inspired by the novel The Passenger (1962) by Zofia Posmysz. The author survived the camp. The decision to bear witness to the cruelty of the Holocaust was obvious to her. The Passenger describes a voyage on a luxury ocean liner, during which the Polish woman Marta recognizes the elegant woman, Lisa, an SS overseer from Auschwitz (the German woman's real name is Annelise Franz). Weinberg's music, in keeping with the action, is diverse, realistic, and symbolic at once; different when it accompanies conversations in the sun on the ship's deck, with the orchestra playing for the passengers to dance to, and different when the hell of Auschwitz unfolds below deck. The prisoners are of different nationalities, so their solo singing, as well as the seven-voice Song of Life and Death , is multilingual. The prisoners ' Requiem for the Black Wall echoes with the bell, Bach's Chaconne , and the camp orchestra. Weinberg's The Passenger, completed in 1968 in the Soviet Union, could not be performed there because its content was too reminiscent of Soviet labor camps. Only in 2006, after the composer's death, was it performed in Moscow in concert. Did staging an opera about Auschwitz seem impossible? And yet, it was. David Pountney produced it in 2010. First, there was the Bregenz Festival and Warsaw. Then London, Houston, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Florida. And everywhere, every time: a stage bisected by light and sound. A cheerful, prosperous Europe. And the hell of the Holocaust. Its memory endures. The world cannot forget.

Unknown

Michał Romanowski

Events

Upcoming events

8 - 12 Mar, 2026

Passenger · Polish National Opera

Past events

10 - 12 May, 2024

The Clemency Of Titus · Opera Bałtycka w Gdańsku

Future and recently performed repertoire

1. SS man in The Passenger by Weinberg

Polish National Opera

About

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