Florida Grand Opera Brings Epic Production of 'The Passenger' to South Florida

From April 2 through April 9, 2016, Florida Grand Opera (FGO) will proudly present Mieczyslaw Weinberg's "The Passenger" at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.

Miami is one of only five communities in the United States with the opportunity to experience this piece, and FGO is honored to present "The Passenger" as the third installment of the company's "Made for Miami" series.

Susan T. Danis, FGO General Director and CEO, recently said, "The Bregenz Festival's world premiere of 'The Passenger' in 2010 was one of the most discussed musical events of the year, and bringing this extraordinary work to Miami will be a major occasion for the South Florida opera audience. We are very proud to be presenting the piece."

Dimitri Shostakovich said of "The Passenger," "It is a perfect masterpiece and, apart from its musical merits, it is a work that is much needed today." His comment is as relevant in 2016 as when he said it in 1974. David Pountney's staging sweeps us from the present to past, using an ingenious unit set of the late designer John Engels that includes mammoth multistory scenery which contains the deck of an ocean liner as well as the Auschwitz barracks with a fleeting, unsettling view of the camp ovens.

The international cast has been assembled from previous productions of the opera. "I focused our casting on singers from the Chicago and Detroit productions since they also performed the poly-lingual version of the opera," says Danis. The international cast includes exceptionally gifted singers from Denmark. Greece, Russia, Hungary, and Poland.

The horrors of World War II were still fresh in 1959 when Auschwitz survivor Sofia Posmysz wrote a play titled "The Passenger in Cabin 45" for Polish radio. The play became the source of the opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 1967. That action of the drama takes us from the stylish gentility of an ocean liner's deck to the squalor of a death camp, where cruelty, despair, and unspeakable courage are evident in equal measure.

The opera tells the story of Liese, a former overseer in Auschwitz, on an ocean liner with her husband who is en route to a new diplomatic post in Brazil. She is stunned upon seeing one of the other passengers, believing her to have been one of the prisoners in Auschwitz. Her husband knows nothing of her past, and Liese is confronted with a harrowing situation.

Weinberg was a Warsaw-Born Polish Jew who lost his parents and a sister to the Holocaust. He wrote this first of his seven operas in Moscow, to which he had escaped on foot in 1939 at the eruption of World War II. He died in 1996 without having seen his opera performed. Much of his music was suppressed by the Soviet authorities during his lifetime and has only resurfaced recently in performances and recordings.

After more than 40 years, Weinberg's gripping opera has emerged anew, electrifying audiences at Austria's Bergen Festival and again in Houston, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and London. "The Passenger" is performed in multiple languages, including German, English, Polish, Yiddish, French, Russian, and Czech.

"The Passenger" runs in Miami at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County / Ziff Ballet Opera House on April 2, 3, 5, 8, and 9, 2016.