As part of a long-term collaboration between the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Yekaterinburg State National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Russian theatre will host a presentation on 13th April of the Mieczysław Weinberg – The Passenger project, accompanied by a half-scripted rendition of Zofia Posmysz's radio drama The Passenger from Cabin 45, which the opera by Mieczysław Weinberg was based upon.
Zofia Posmysz – an author, screenwriter and radio reporter who was imprisoned during the war in Nazi concentration camps – wrote her radio drama in 1959 (directed by Jerzy Rakowiecki, and starring Aleksandra Śląska and Jan Świderski), a year later she wrote a script for a television film, directed by Andrzej Munk. In 1961, together with Munk, she turned The Passenger into a movie script, the production of which was disrupted because of the director's untimely death. The novel version was published in 1962 and has since been translated into fifteen languages. It was the first literary depiction of the reality of the concentration and death camps from the perspective of the German executioners.
Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish composer of Jewish descent, described himself in the following words:
I am Szostakowicz's student. Even though I've never taken lessons by him. I consider myself to be his student, to be his body and blood.
On 14th April, the orchestra, choir and soloists of the Yekaterinburg Opera, conducted by Monika Wolińska, will perform Weinberg's Symphony No. 8 Polish Flowers to poems by Julian Tuwim, a poet whom Weinberg admired greatly. Besides the symphony, Weinberg also composed a number of songs to Tuwim’s poems.
One description of the concert, during which Symphony No. 8 was performed, was as follows:
It's a vast, ten-part masterpiece, which, despite a wide range of instruments and voices, has a very personal character. The composer reaches here towards his youthful memories, invoked by the poetry verses. The most intimate fragments – such as the eighth part dedicated to a Polish and Jewish mother – impact the audience not with loftiness and pathos, but with focus and even a certain distance.
The project's other events are planned for September 2016, when a stage version of The Passenger will be shown in Russia for the first time. The production is being prepared by American director Thaddeus Strassberger. Weinberg finished his composition in 1968, but its pre-premiere (of the concert version) only finally took place on 25th December 2006 in Moscow, while the stage version premiered in July 2010 during the Bregenzer Festival.