Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla Conducts Mieczysław Weinberg’s first opera, The Passenger

The recording was made during the acclaimed March 2024 run of The Passenger in Madrid

It features the Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real, and a cast headed by
Amanda Majeski, Daveda Karanas, Nikolai Schukoff and Gyula Orendt

The Passenger will be released as a digital audio album on 24 January 2025

Watch the film of the opera on STAGE+

“Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla brought convincingly to life all the emotional, melodic and
timbral demands of … a work that explores some of the most difficult
aspects of human experience with audacity and originality”

Bachtrack, reviewing the 2024 Teatro Real production

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is one of today’s leading ambassadors for the long-neglected music of the Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–96). Following on from her critically lauded readings of several of his major orchestral works, Deutsche Grammophon is now delighted to present a new recording of the first of Weinberg’s seven operas, The Passenger, with the Lithuanian conductor again at the helm. The album captures the version of this “shattering Holocaust opera” (The Critic) staged at Madrid’s Teatro Real in spring 2024, a revival of the world premiere production directed by fellow Weinberg champion David Pountney (a Teatro Real co‑production with the Bregenz Festival, Teatr Wielki and English National Opera).

Making her Madrid operatic debut, Gražinytė-Tyla conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Real and a cast including soprano Amanda Majeski (Marta), mezzo-soprano Daveda Karanas (Lisa), tenor Nikolai Schukoff (Walter) and baritone Gyula Orendt (Tadeusz). Violinist Stephen Waarts doubles as Tadeusz for the instrumental solo. The filmed version of The Passenger is available to stream now on STAGE+. The audio album is set for digital release on 24 January 2025, shortly before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January), which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, and honours the memory of all victims of Nazism.

Born in Warsaw, Weinberg fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for the Soviet Union in 1939. It was only in 1966 that he learned that the rest of his family had died in a concentration camp during World War Two. A year later he began work on The Passenger, setting a libretto by Alexander Medvedev which was based in turn on the novel of the same name by the Polish writer Zofia Posmysz, an Auschwitz survivor, and was brought to the composer’s attention thanks to his long-time friend Shostakovich.

Weinberg completed the opera in 1968, but all attempts to stage it during his lifetime were thwarted by the Soviet authorities. A semi-staged version in Moscow in 2006 was followed by David Pountney’s world premiere production at the Bregenz Festival in 2010. Reviewing the DVD of that full staging, Alex Ross of The New Yorker called The Passenger “a work of concentrated power that outweighs most other attempts to dramatise the Holocaust”.

The action of the opera switches between the deck of an ocean liner sailing from Europe to Brazil in the early 1960s, and the concentration camp of Auschwitz. On board the ship, Lisa, wife of German diplomat Walter, who is heading to a new posting in Brazil, believes she has recognised a woman she thought was dead. The latter is the “passenger” of the title – Marta, a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz, where Lisa herself was an SS guard, a fact she only now discloses to her husband, who has to decide how to come to terms with this revelation. Wartime flashbacks, meanwhile, depict the horrors of the camp and the doomed relationship between Marta and her violinist fiancé Tadeusz.

The audience never knows for sure whether the passenger is really Marta or not and a complex sense of ambiguity runs throughout the opera. Lisa is not depicted as entirely evil, for example – despite her inability to accept responsibility for her actions, she is haunted by the horrors in which she played a part. Weinberg’s music is kaleidoscopic in its variety, one moment portraying the rich passengers on the liner, the next reflecting the many nationalities of those imprisoned in Auschwitz. And, as David Pountney notes, at times the music becomes virtually inaudible, as the composer allows the emotion of the moment to speak for itself.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla opened her career as a DG artist in 2019 with recordings of Weinberg’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21, adding Nos. 3 and 7 and his Flute Concerto No. 1 to her discography in 2022. These albums have played a key role in the revival of the composer’s prolific output. The conductor has also continued her efforts to bring his music to a wider audience through numerous live performances including, in 2024, not just The Passenger but his final, Dostoevsky-inspired opera The Idiot, in a new production at the Salzburg Festival – it too is available on STAGE+. Her forthcoming schedule, meanwhile, features Weinberg’s Fifth Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Birmingham (11 June 2025).