Ariadne on Naxos was the third opera written by Richard Strauss together with librettist Hugon von Hoffmansthal. Their collaboration had started with the expressionist Elektra, followed two years later by a drastically different, Mozartian Der Rosenkavalier.  Their next project drew heavily on literary inspirations. The one-act opera was meant to be shown at the end of Molièr’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which Hoffmansthal had just translated into German. The version of Ariadne that prevailed to our times has a prologue setting the metatheatrical stage for the opera. 

Ariadne On Naxos

Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera

Krzysztof Penderecki has the ability to build fascinating worlds in his operas. His third work for the stage, The Black Mask, transports the audience into the future, to a Lower Silesian town of Bolkenhain (now: Bolków).

The Black Mask

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.

Adriana Ferfecka

Events

Upcoming events

8 - 12 Mar, 2026

Passenger · Polish National Opera

Past events

4 - 27 Apr, 2025

Ariadne On Naxos · Polish National Opera

22 - 29 Nov, 2024

The Black Mask · Polish National Opera

Future and recently performed repertoire

Katia in The Passenger by Weinberg

Polish National Opera

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