The Passenger, no more
NewsZofia Posmysz, librettist of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s powerful opera The Passenger, died this week in a hospice in the town of Oswiecym, formerly known as Auschwitz. She was 98.
Zofia was seized by the Germans as a resistant and spent years in two concentration camps. She wrote a radio play in 1959 about a survivor who meets her oppressor on a cruise liner. It became a film, then an opera.
She was present in 2012 when English National Opera gave the world English-language premiere in London.
Beautiful, gentle,wise Person…R.I.P.
Filharmonika
I saw the excellent David Pountney production, designed by our wonderful, designer friend, Johan Engel in Chicago. A very powerful and important opera that has stayed in the memory since.
Oświęcim, not Oswiecym. If you can manage accents in French and umlauts in German, surely it shouldn’t be too hard to get the diacritics right in Polish too.
And it should be noted that it was not “originally known as Auschwitz,” because that is a German bastardization of the Polish. It is like saying “Wien, originally known as Vienna.”
She survived, as she said once, because she never lost hope., although she never really left Auschwitz . Many years after, she could not listen to Strauss’s Waltzes. She will be buried in Oświęcim (Auschwitz)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/world/zofia-posmysz-dead.html
I was very fortunate to see opening night of the American premier of The Passenger at Houston Grand Opera. Melody Moore in this role gave a transcendent emotional journey that has stayed with me ever since. This would be an opera that would really stay with you if you heard it and saw it fully realized.