“Angesichts der Wirklichkeit ist alles Erfinden obszön.” “In the face of reality, all fiction is obscene.” That sentence, by the Austrian writer Jürg Amann, came back to me during the Lincoln Center Festival performance of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Holocaust opera The Passenger. The director David Pountney cites the line in a program note, acknowledging the moral challenge of transplanting a chorus of the doomed from Auschwitz to an operatic stage. Based on the novel by the Polish camp survivor Zofia Posmysz, composed in the 1960s, suppressed by the Soviet state, and left unperformed until 2010, The Passenger has been resurrected in the guise of a historical triumph — a tale that must be told, a score that must be heard. But it remains troubling, an earnest, frequently beautiful, and fitfully powerful drama about the relationship between prisoner and guard. Its many splendid moments aestheticize Auschwitz; its weaker ones fall back on...
- 7/11/2014
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
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