The opera is orchestrated by an international team led by maestro Livier von Dohnányi, the principal conductor of the Ekaterinburg State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, and Thaddeus Strassberger, an American director and set designer.
Thaddeus Strassberger cooperates with opera houses throughout the world. In 2016 he was awarded the Golden Mask (Critic's Award for Best Production) for the opera Satyagraha composed by Philip Glass, also prepared in Yekaterinburg.
I’m facing the task to stage an opera which will tell about one of the most horrible crimes in the history of mankind. I think that opera as an art form is best suited to that because it is always up-to-date. In Auschwitz I was startled by the silence and the feeling of being alone. Scents and texture of surfaces indoors were somehow different from the others.Time seemed to have stopped and there was a feeling that people had disappeared from there a minute before… ‒ the director said after a visit to Kraków before beginning to stage The Passenger.
The Ekaterinburg premiere of The Passenger is the first full staging of the opera in Russia. So far only a concert version premiered in Moscow in 2006. A guest performance of the opera at the Bolshoi Theatre ‒ accompanied by a symposium on Mieczysław Weinberg ‒ is scheduled for February 2017.
The Passenger was written by Mieczysław Weinberg, a composer born in 1919. The libretto by Yuri Lukin and Alexander Medvedev is based on the novel of the same name by Zofia Posmysz. The novel was inspired by the Posmysz's personal experiences of war and post-war. It developed in 1959, originally as a radio play, then expanded to the size of the novel in 1962.
Weinberg composed the opera in 1968. The first full staging of the opera took place in 2010 at the Opera Festival in Bregenz, thanks to the cooperation of Bregenzer Festspiele, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (in particular the Polska Music project) and the National Opera in Warsaw.