DIE PASSAGIERIN

The Passenger with Tobias Kratzer, born in 1980 in Landshut, Bavaria, now stages his first opera at the National Theatre. The same team has accompanied him on all new productions he has directed in recent years: Rainer Sellmaier is responsible for stage and costume, Manuel Braun is responsible for video, in the new production also with Jonas Dahl. General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski conducts, Christopher Warmuth is the dramaturge, Michael Bauer does the lighting. 

Murder is never statute-barred. And nor is guilt. Lisa, an SS overseer in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War, is confronted late in life with the crimes of her youth. Travelling on a ship, she thinks she recognises a passenger, Marta, a prisoner she perfidiously lied to in the camp. And so the past, which she has so meticulously and carefully suppressed all these years, rushes back into her consciousness. The two-act opera by Mieczysław Weinberg was composed in 1968. Weinberg’s parents and sister were murdered in the Trawniki concentration camp. The basis for the libretto was the novella by Zofia Posmysz. After internment in Auschwitz for two and a half years, Posmysz was moved to the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp, until it was liberated in 1945. She died in August 2022, having seen every performance of The Passenger since its concert world premiere in 2006.