Lines that have escaped Destruction: Weinberg and 'The Passenger'

Lines that have Escaped Destruction: Weinberg and The Passenger Daniel Elphick As recently as five years ago, Weinberg’s name was known only to a handful of specialists. But following the 2010 premiere of his first opera, The Passenger, his music has been attracting strong reactions from audiences and critics alike.1 Reviews of the opera have ranged from praise as ‘a close encounter with great art’2 to dismissal as ‘unsatisfying [and] disingenuous’.3 The main reason for such polarised responses is self-evident; The Passenger deals directly with the Holocaust, with a large proportion of the staged drama set in Auschwitz itself. The plot gives the perspectives of both prisoners and guards, as well as a Greek-style chorus. However, Weinberg’s music is markedly different from the repertoire that Western audiences may be familiar with as Holocaust commemoration, in works ranging from anti-sentimental twelve-note pieces to the overtly emotional language of Hollywood film scores.4 The Passenger begins onboard a ship sailing across the Atlantic, 1960. En route are a couple leaving for a new life in Brazil, Walter and Liese. Walter is due to take up an ambassadorial post there, and the two enthuse about their new life. Suddenly, Liese is startled by a mysterious female passenger, and she is forced to confront her own past in a confession to Walter. It emerges that Liese was a guard at Auschwitz in her early twenties, and the lady she saw bears a striking resemblance to a Polish woman, Marta, who was in her charge. The opening prologue hints at the menace to come in the opera, with a quintuplet timpani motif (see Ex. 1, below). 1 Ex. 1, The Passenger, Act One, Scene One, opening. Striking and threatening, this motif comes to be associated with the setting of Auschwitz itself, marked by reprises at important dramatic moments. Such an opening quickly establishes the mood for the opera and sets the tone for much of the music that follows. Weinberg scores more intimate scenes with greater sensitivity, but the use of twelve-note effects as suggested from this opening is a defining aspect of much of the music that follows in The Passenger. Life on board the ship is illustrated through jazz-like passages, and an ascending line accompanies the couple’s hopes for the future – a line that will also be expanded later in the opera. With Liese’s confession to her husband, the onstage setting shifts in flashback to the horror of Auschwitz itself. Here, the two-level design of the staging comes into its own, with the sleek deck of the passenger liner above, and the macabre darkness of Auschwitz below. For the rest of the lengthy first act, the action is set in Auschwitz, complete with roll-calls, beatings and the torment of everyday life for prisoners. Such literal depiction of life in a concentration camp immediately invites criticism. Detractors have disparaged such representation as ‘mining the Shoah for artistic or entertainment material’.5 The big question that arises from The Passenger is one of appropriateness - can it ever be appropriate to depict the suffering of concentration camps on stage? To understand Weinberg’s 2 motivations for writing the opera, I will briefly summarise his biography. Whether or not this can serve as a defence for The Passenger will be explored below. Weinberg in his study, 1982. 6 As with so many of his contemporaries, Weinberg’s life was replete with tragedy.7 He was born in Warsaw in 1919, the first child of a Jewish family. His father, Shmuel, played violin in the local Jewish theatre orchestra. Young Mieczysław (or Metek, as his friends knew him) started taking piano lessons and joined his father in the orchestra from the age of ten. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatoire with Josef Turczynski, a famed pianist and co-editor of the first complete Chopin edition. To all appearances, the family lived a happy life, and the young Weinberg had a promising career in prospect. All this abruptly changed with the German advance into Poland in September 1939. It was evident that with a German occupation, a Jewish family would not remain safe. Weinberg and his sister, Ester, made preparations to flee. They chose to head east, hoping for sanctuary in the Soviet Union. Ester turned back soon afterwards, as her feet were sore from walking. Now on his own, Weinberg set out on the perilous migration of several hundred miles. He would never see his family again. After a harrowing journey with little food and the constant threat of death, Weinberg reached the Belorussian border and was granted entry. He enjoyed the support of the Soviet state; he was 3 allowed to continue his studies fully funded at the Minsk Conservatoire, now in composition, under the tutelage of Vasily Zolotaryov. Weinberg quickly made a name for himself as a composer and a performer. Yet, he was forced to flee again with the German advance into the USSR in 1941. This time, he packed himself onto a train to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which had become something of a beacon for Soviet artists seeking refuge. There Weinberg continued to write, and he became a prominent member of the arts community. In 1942, he married his first wife, Nataliya, the daughter of the world-famous Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, then president of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. It was through Mikhoels that Weinberg first made contact with Shostakovich and sent him the score of his First Symphony. Shostakovich was so impressed that he arranged for a permit for Weinberg and his family to relocate to Moscow, which they did in 1944. The two composers became firm friends, enjoying a close relationship that lasted for over thirty years. It was at this time that Weinberg began to hear rumours about the fate of his family. They had been sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and from there to the Trawniki labour camp in 1942. On 3 November 1943, as part of the infamous Operation Harvest Festival, all Jewish inmates were rounded up, walked outside and shot. Weinberg’s parents and sister were among them. It took Weinberg many years to fully confirm these reports. He only knew for sure during the 1960s – just as he began work on The Passenger. 8 Having been scarred by the Holocaust, Weinberg would go on to experience anti-semitism sanctioned by the Soviet state. In January 1948, Mikhoels was murdered on Stalin’s orders and his death covered up to look like a car accident. In an act of callous hypocrisy, he received a State funeral. Weinberg himself was imprisoned for several months in 1953, as part of the anti-semitic campaign undertaken during the last years of Stalin’s life. Having lost his close family to the Nazis and his father-in-law to Stalin, and having been persecuted himself, Weinberg was changed for life. He summed up his guilt about survival to his first wife: 4 If I consider myself marked out by the preservation of my life, then that gives me a kind of feeling that it is impossible to repay the debt, that no 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week creative hard labour would take me even an inch towards paying it off. 9 Weinberg set about trying to commemorate the victims through his music, a mission he would obsess over for the rest of his career. It is against this background that Weinberg came to write The Passenger in 1967. In the second act of the opera, Liese’s flashback to Auschwitz continues, showing her relationship with the prisoner Marta. The focus of the drama is very much on the innocence and victimhood of the inmates, as opposed to the illustration of Nazi cruelty. Marta is strong and defiant amongst the prisoners, irritating Liese, who dubs her ‘the Madonna of the camp’ and resolves to break her spirit. She discovers that Marta’s fiancé, Tadeusz, is also an inmate as she interrupts a meeting between them. Tadeusz is scheduled to perform the Commandant’s favourite waltz on the violin before an assembly of the camp’s guards. Liese offers to help the couple to meet in secret, but both of them refuse. They would rather be alone than be indebted to one of their captors. Their refusal makes Liese furious, and she arranges for them to be punished – Tadeusz sent to his death and Marta to the punishment block. The setting returns to the passenger ship as Liese has finished her tale. She and Walter resolve to put the past behind them, and ignore the mysterious passenger onboard, even if it should prove to be Marta. Her identity becomes clear during a dance, however, when Marta requests the band to play the Auschwitz Commandant’s favourite waltz. Liese, near-delirious, goes to confront Marta. The sight of her face forces her to remember Tadeusz’s concert at Auschwitz, and the stage setting returns. At the climax of the opera, the guards gather to hear the violinist. He refuses to play the Commandant’s waltz, but strikes up Bach’s Chaconne in D minor instead, throwing German high culture back in the faces of his captors (see Ex. 2, below, for the build-up to this moment of intense drama). 5 Ex. 2, The Passenger, Scene 8, from fig. 2 As Tadeusz plays, the first violins join him, making for a moving depiction of defiance in the face of authority. The rest of the orchestra builds a chord of the verticalised note-row featured in much of the twelve-note writing throughout the opera. The German officers angrily interrupt Tadeusz’s playing and he is led away to be killed, his violin smashed onstage. The opera ends on an epilogue set by a river, as Marta promises never to forget her fellow inmates. Overall, The Passenger, is a work of intense drama, suited to operatic treatment. There are also tender moments, in scenes illustrating the solidarity between the female prisoners in their barracks. In one intimate scene, Marta sings of her ideal birthday present: being able to choose which way to die, either as a proud warrior in battle, or to die tranquil and free. The opera is based on a book by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, and was adapted into a libretto by Alexander Medvedev. The work does not portray an exclusively Jewish experience in Auschwitz, but instead depicts an international array of identities; the prisoners’ nationalities include French, Polish, Russian, Greek and Czech, Christian and Jewish. Weinberg’s music employs 6 no specifically Jewish themes, though the use of Polish and Russian folk idioms is apparent. Musical quotation highlights the perversion of German culture. Such quotes include the folk song ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’ and Schubert’s ‘Marche Militaire’, as well as the Bach Chaconne. Weinberg did not live to hear The Passenger performed. It was given a semi-staged premiere in 2006, on 25 December in Moscow. 10 The fully-staged premiere had to wait until 2010, at the Bregenz festival, under the direction of David Pountney. Critical reactions have varied from production to production. For instance, the 2006 premiere received unanimous praise, as did the Bregenz staging. This is not to say that Pountney’s staging is without its flaws; for instance, for the Bach Chaconne scene, he has Tadeusz with his back to the audience, playing his solo while the German Kommandant falls asleep. This goes against the stage directions, which clearly mark the poignancy of the action – the whole violin section is instructed to play for the entire solo, implicitly calling for a ‘freeze-frame’, outside of the onstage action. Pountney’s production, for all its groundbreaking work, falls short in this vital scene. When Pountney’s production opened in London in 2011, reception was mixed. This was, in part, due to a lacklustre performance in comparison to the previous year’s staging, but can also be put down to the predisposition of London critics. The London opera scene has in recent years witnessed several productions claiming new levels of mastery, and this has likely rendered writers wary of new or newly discovered works with similar claims, along with an entirely different set of attitudes to the Holocaust compared to that of Austrians and Germans. Pountney’s production premiered before American audiences in Houston in January 2014 and met with unanimous praise from critics. A separate production opened in Karlsruhe earlier this year with a more abstract design concept compared to Johann Engels’s split-set design for the Bregenz premiere. Reactions to Holocaust commemoration Critical reactions to the opera have sometimes reflected on more fundamental issues with the depiction of genocide in art. Perhaps the most oft-repeated quote from twentieth-century philosophy 7 is Adorno’s famous line ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.11 For critics, it serves as a useful tool for the dismissal of commemorative works. Examining the context of Adorno’s point is revealing, however. The full passage reads: Neutralized and ready-made, traditional culture has become worthless today. The more total society becomes, the greater the reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. 12 The quote can only be fully understood in its context, in which Adorno emphasises the death of what he understands as culture.13 Tellingly, it appears that Adorno himself later considered the passage to be over-exaggerated. He returned to the claim twenty years later: Just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not write poems... it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness.14 Adorno transforms his original assertion into a Kafka-esque reading of the phenomenon of ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ in the following passage from Negative Dialectics that provides an even more relevant perspective on Weinberg’s motives for composing commemorative works: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival 8 calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.15 By elaborating on his earlier work, Adorno sheds light on the deeply personal and painful topic, similar to Freud’s ‘Death Drive’.16 Adorno’s drastic reading sheds light on artists’ search to represent and memorialise the Holocaust.17 Another important bone of contention is whether biographical details can be used to defend a work such as The Passenger, or whether they function as emotional blackmail. Gillian Rose coined the term ‘Holocaust piety’, in reference to Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, critiquing sentimentalised approaches to the depiction of genocide. The use of background biography to support a work is the sentimental fallacy par excellence. With biographical knowledge, emotional impact is heightened, but it does not follow that a work with extraordinary origins must be a masterpiece. For validation of claims to mastery, we must look elsewhere. The question of ‘ineffability’ is sometimes raised in response to accusations of ‘Holocaust piety’, adequately summed up in a quote from Samuel Beckett, featured in Art Spiegelman’s visual novel ‘Maus’: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’. 18 Rose dismantles such dismissive attitudes in the following passage: To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human.19 9 The Passenger confronts head-on the issue of ‘all too human’. The exploration of the psychological make-up of the tormented guard Liese is one of the main threads of the drama. Framed within Weinberg’s masterful score, it is this confrontation of humanity vs. inhumanity that prevents The Passenger from being interpreted as a work of ‘piety’. It is a fictional narrative and therein lies its Adornian ‘coldness’; it makes no claims to represent the narrative of the Holocaust. In this way, The Passenger stands as a work that demands to be addressed. Weinberg’s commemorative works Recent years have seen the emergence of a new musical sub-genre, one that has attracted as much criticism as it has fascination, namely, art music written in commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. Within this genre, a piece can be viewed one of four ways: A) it features a text that explicitly deals with the Holocaust; B) the work is abstract, but bears a dedication specifically about victims of the Holocaust; C) it employs musical materials seen to be related to the Holocaust such as melodies from the ghettos; D) the work has come to be strongly associated with the Holocaust through regular use in film or television soundtracks. The majority of works that we may class in this genre come from Western countries and Israel, as opposed to Eastern Europe. This is perfectly understandable, owing to the vast emigration from Europe of Holocaust survivors and their families. Many important composers have written commemorative works, including figures as diverse as Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Górecki and Reich. Ben Arnold’s breakthrough study ‘Art Music and the Holocaust’ provides a list of works up to 1988, which I reproduce here in full.20 A quick glance reveals several common threads. Fig. 1, Table of commemorative comme works, from Ben Arnold’s ‘Artt Music and an the Holocaust’ Composer Title Date Partos Yizkor (In Memoriam) 1947 Edel Suite In Memoriam 1947 Schoenberg A Survivor from Warsaw 1947 10 Fig. 1, Table of commemorative comme works, from Ben Arnold’s ‘Artt Music and an the Holocaust’ Composer Title Date Frankel Violin Concerto 1951 Podešva Kounicovy Kolejie (Kounir College) 1956 Mácha Night and Hope (Noc a Naděje) 1959 Šesták Auschwitz 1959 Reiner Butterflies Do Not Live Here Anymore 1960 Hartig Mass after a Holocaust 1960 White The Diary of Anne Frank 1960 Zeljenka Oswieczym 1960 Flosman Butterflies Do Not Live Here 1961 Josephs Requiescant pro defunctis iudaies 1961 Křivinka Butterflies Do Not Live Here 1962 Shostakovich Symphony No. 13, ‘Babi Yar’ 1962 Kolman Requiem 1963 Rayki Elegaic Variations c. 1964 Amram The Final Ingredient 1965 Finko Holocaust: An uprising in the Ghetto 1965 Nono Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz 1965 Waxman Song of Terezín 1965 Rideout In Memoriam Anne Frank c. 1965 Derr I Never Saw Another Butterfly 1966 Hamilton Threnos––In Time of War 1966 Penderecki Dies Irae 1967 Glick I Never Saw Another Butterfly 1968 Schwartz Auschwitz 1968 Frid Anne Frank’s Diary 1969 Adomlan Auschwitz 1970 Morawetz From the Diary of Anne Frank 1970 Morawetz Who Has Allowed Us To Suffer? 1972 Mitrea-Celarianu Piano de matin ‘Ecouté pour Anne Frank’ 1972 Davidson I Never Saw Another Butterfly c. 1974 Schwartz Caligula 1975 Górecki Symphony No. 3, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ 1977 11 Fig. 1, Table of commemorative comme works, from Ben Arnold’s ‘Artt Music and an the Holocaust’ Composer Title Date Gelbrun Holocaust & Revival 1978 Blitentajl Lament for the Holocaust 1978 Gould Holocaust Suite 1978 Steinberg Echoes of Children 1978 Hardyk I Never Saw Another Butterfly c. 1980 Halpern Music for the Holocaust Day 1982 Halpern To Remember It All: Prayer for Holocaust Day 1982 Marez Oyens Charon’s Gift 1982 Tarski Five Songs for the Holocaust 1982 Katzer Aide Memoire 1983 Martland Babi Yar 1983 Schwartz Grimaces 1984 Kox Child of Light: Anne Frank Cantata 1985 Lees Symphony No. 4, ‘Memorial Candles’ 1985 Rosner From the Diaries of Adam Czerniakow 1986 Reich Different Trains 1988 Frequently composers have sought to commemorate in a dehumanised context, through the medium of twelve-note composition.21 Not only does this technique evoke different semantics from traditional tonal music, it was also outlawed by the Nazis themselves. Twelve-note examples in this table include Schoenberg and Penderecki. Other composers, such as Górecki, opt for a neo-tonal idiom, slow and sorrowful in its repetition. Wholly distinct is Steve Reich’s Different Trains, combining taped testimony with live minimalist loops to create a work as moving in its social resonance as it is personal to Reich’s own experiences. The only Russian work on the list is Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar. An examination of this work gives us more background of the context and attitudes that surrounded Weinberg in the USSR. In his Thirteenth Symphony, Shostakovich sets poems by Yevtushenko, and the first movement describes the murder of Jews in Kiev by German troops, beginning with the damning 12 line ‘there is no memorial above Babi Yar’.22 Leading up to the premiere of the work, Yevtushenko was pressured to alter the text, in order to fit the official line. 23 The Soviet government always remained uneasy about commemorations for the Holocaust. They believed that such memorials did a dis-service to the suffering endured by the Soviet people as a whole during the war, both civilian and military. 24 As such, Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony was daring for its time. Considering this official line, it is little surprise that The Passenger was not performed during Weinberg’s lifetime.25 Several potential productions were discussed, but none materialised.26 Nevertheless, a piano/vocal score was published in 1974, and Shostakovich provided the foreword, in which he wrote: I shall never tire of taking delight in Weinberg's opera The Passenger… It is a masterful work, perfect in form and style… The music of the opera is shattering in its dramatic impact… I perceive this opera as a hymn to mankind, a hymn to the international solidarity of people who oppose the most terrible evil in the world, the name of which is fascism. 27 The musical content of The Passenger fits within several trends of commemorative works, as noted above. For example, Weinberg makes occasional use of a twelve-note row throughout the opera. It is first heard in the opening scene, accompanying Walther’s words ‘How the past tortures the soul’. In this initial statement, its meaning is fairly innocent, as Walther laments his increasing age, including the loss of his hair (see Ex. 3, below). Ex.3, The Passenger, Scene one, four bars before rehearsal mark 14. 13 Its full power is unleashed as the underpinning to Tadeusz’s Bach Chaconne, where the orchestra plays the row in verticalised form slowly, confirming the stage directions that he should ‘play as if before the whole world’. 28 Weinberg’s use of a 12-note row fits within its ‘dehumanized’ symbolism in works noted above, while also exploiting its semantic associations with brutishness and horror, deriving specifically from Allan Berg’s Wozzeck, particularly when juxtaposed against the purity of Bach. Elsewhere, Weinberg’s use of folk-like idioms in the opera is comparable to the neo-tonal music of several works from Arnold’s study. These include passages such as Marta’s birthday song, mentioned above. In scene 3, an elderly Polish woman sings a prayer, to the melody of an anonymous 15th century Polish chorale, accompanied by dirge-like strings. In scene 6, a Russian prisoner sings a folk-song from her childhood; the text is authentic, but the melody is of Weinberg’s own devising. It is performed a cappella, in a passage that would appear to have been deployed as an attempt to appease the Soviet authorities by its appeal to patriotic sentiment. In sum, The Passenger holds its own against the notable works listed above. It was, however, not Weinberg’s first attempt to address the Holocaust in his work, nor would it be the last. Building on Antonina Klokova’s work to supplement Arnold’s list, Weinberg’s output constitutes almost certainly the largest commemorative project by a single composer.29 The following works deal with the Holocaust directly in their subject matter: 14 Fig. 2, Weinberg’s Holocaust commemoration works Title Year Ded. Details Reminiscences, Op. 62 1958 Symphony No. 6, Op. 79 1962-3 Symphony No. 8, Op. 83 1964 A Diary of Love, Op. 87 1965 To the children who died in Auschwitz Cantata with texts about the grief felt by a Holocaust survivor Profile, Romances, Op. 88 1965 Weinberg’s first wife, Nataliya Vovsi-Mikhoels Song cycle, with texts about purges and pogroms Symphony No. 9, Lines that have escaped Destruction, Op. 93 1967 The Passenger, Op. 97 1967-8 The victims of Auschwitz Opera on the novel Pasażerka by Zofia Posmyz, partly set in Auschwitz Symphony No. 21, Op. 152 1991 In memory of those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto Subtitle Kaddish Tuwim texts, incorporated into Symphony No. 8 Weinberg’s daughter, Victoria References to Babi Yar massacre Texts about the Warsaw ghetto Texts addressing the liberation of Warsaw In addition to these, there are also works dedicated to the composer’s parents and sister, often expanding themes explored in works from the above table. For instance, Weinberg’s 13th Symphony, dedicated to his Mother, quotes from Marta’s aria about death from The Passenger. 15 Fig 3, Works dedicated to Weinberg’s family Title Year Ded. Details Symphony No. 13, Op. 115 1976 In memory of the composer’s mother Incorporates passages from The Passenger, relating to female camp inmates Sonata No. 3 for Violin solo, Op. 126 1979 In memory of the composer’s father String Quartet No. 16, Op. 130 1981 In memory of the composer’s sister Symphony No. 16, Op. 131 1981 In memory of the composer’s mother Memorial, Op. 132 1981 In memory of the composer’s mother Song Sonata No. 6 for Violin and Piano, Op. 136bis 1983 In memory of the composer’s mother The work was discovered recently, Weinberg appears to have cast it aside 1981 would have been his sister’s sixtieth birthday In addition to these, we can also include works more generally in commemoration of the victims of war, including several with a Jewish frame of reference: 16 Fig. 4, Weinberg’s works in commemoration of war Title Year Ded. Details Jewish Songs, Op. 13 1943 Jewish Songs, Op. 17 1944 Sinfonietta No. 1, Op. 41 1948 Friendship of the Nations of the USSR Allegedly featured a Mikhoels quote in protest at his murder (though this is unverified) The White Chrysanthemum, Op. 64 (Ballet) 1958 Ballet set during WWII. Written in Blood, Op. 90 1966 Julian Tuwim texts on war and fate Hiroshima Stanzas, Op. 92 1966 Requiem, Op. 96 1965-6 In a similar vein to Britten’s War Requiem, reworks Hiroshima Stanzas Madonna and Soldier, Op. 105 (Opera) 1970-1 Opera set during WWII, including patriotic choruses and triumphant ending Symphony No. 17, Memory, Op. 137, Symphony No. 18, War there is no word more cruel, Op. 139, and Symphony No. 19, Bright May, Op. 142 1982-5 The victims of Hiroshima In memory of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War Deals with Hiroshima in its texts Commemorative symphonic trilogy, collectively entitled Having Crossed the Threshold of War; all three feature texts by Anna Akhmatova marked in the score Weinberg’s approach in these works is highly personal. His lyrical persona and frequent use of choral forces are both reminiscent of late Shostakovich, while his chosen texts are frequently more dignified than denunciatory in tone, promising to remember the victims of atrocities. It is apparent that Weinberg’s life-long mission to commemorate the victims of war spanned many years. In a revealing interview from the time of the premiere of his Eighth Symphony, he summed up his motivation in a statement that could broadly apply to all of these works, especially The Passenger: In the war my entire family was murdered by Hitler’s executioners. For many years I wanted to write a work in which all the events would be reflected on which the poem was founded––the social contrasts in Poland before the war, the horrors of war, and at the same time the deep faith of the poet in the victory of freedom, justice and humanism. 30 17 The sheer quantity of Weinberg’s commemorative works stands as testament to his efforts to address the tragedies that afflicted his life. The artistic success of these works is attested by the considerable revival that his music is currently enjoying. Most controversial of all, The Passenger can be easily regarded as Weinberg’s masterpiece – indeed, Weinberg himself regarded it as such, as well as Shostakovich.31 The Passenger continues to divide audiences to this day, though with many accepting it as profoundly affecting. Following its staged premiere at the 2010 Bregenz Festival, it has been performed in London, Madrid, Berlin, Warsaw, Karlsruhe and Tel Aviv, with further runs lined up in Houston and New York in 2014, and Chicago in 2015. Weinberg continues to be enjoyed by new audiences, as more and more listeners come to hear the music of this forgotten master. The Passenger may not solve any of the questions surrounding artistic monuments to victims of atrocities, but it certainly stands tall as the most remarkable work of music-drama written in response to the Holocaust. 18 NOTES 1 All music examples © Copyright Peermusic Classical GmbH Hamburg, reproduced by kind permission of the publishers. 2 Martin Anderson, ‘First Performances - Bregenz: Festival 'In der Fremde' - music of Mieczysław Weinberg’, in Tempo, 65 (2011) 55. 3 Alexandra Coghlan, ‘Review: “The Passenger”, English National Opera’ in The New Statesman (3 October 2011) 70. 4 For an exploration of attitudes to ‘Holocaust works’, see: Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 1-34. 5 Gerald Jacobs, ‘Editorial: Artists shouldn’t be passengers when it comes to the Holocaust’, The Jewish Chronicle (online edition), 14 November 2011: http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/58279/artists-shouldnt-bepassengers-when-it-comes-holocaust, accessed 20/09/13. 6 Photograph copyright Tommy Persson, used with permission. 7 Much of the following biography is summarised from David Fanning, Mieczysław Weinberg: In Search of Freedom, (Hofheim: Wolke, 2010). 8 From Nataliya Vovsi-Mikhoels, telephone conversation with Per Skans, 20 October 2006, quoted in Fanning, Mieczysław Weinberg, 36. 9 From: Anon., ‘Pis’ma o lyubvi’ [Love Letters], Muzïkal’naya zhizn’, 2 (2000), p. 19, quoted in Fanning, Mieczysław Weinberg, 15. 10 For an article detailing The Passenger’s rocky performance history (or lack thereof), see: Sergey Yakovenko, ‘Mirovaya prem’era – cherez desyatiletiya’ [A world premiere – after decades], Muzïkal’naya akademiya, 1 (2007) 62. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981) 34. 12 Ibid. 13 Even a scholar as prestigious as Richard Taruskin has taken Adorno out of context on this quote. See: Richard Taruskin, ‘A Sturdy Bridge to the 21st Century’ New York Times, 24 August 1997. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) 110. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) 362-63. 16 See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1984) 269-338. This has subsequently been dubbed ‘Thanatos’, in opposition to Freud’s ‘Eros’ instinct, see: J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988) 447. 17 For further study of Adorno’s famous Holocaust quote, see: Anthony Rowland ‘Re-reading 'Impossibility' and 'Barbarism': Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics’, Critical Survey, 9 (1997) 57-69. 18 Samuel Beckett, ‘Samuel Beckett talks about Beckett’, interview with John Gruen, Vogue (December 1969) 210, quoted in Art Spiegelman, Maus II, A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991) 45. 19 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 43. 20 Ben Arnold, ‘Art Music and the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 6 (1991) 335-49. 19 21 Of course, Arnold’s survey now appears severely incomplete. Antonina Klokova, in her article ‘“Meine Moralische Pflicht” Mieczysław Weinberg und der Holocaust’, goes some way to address this, with several Polish commemorative works, see: Antonina Klokova, ‘“Meine Moralische Pflicht” Mieczysław Weinberg und der Holocaust’ in Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel (eds.) Die Macht der Musik, Mieczysław Weinberg: Eine Chronik in Tönen Osteuropa, 60 (2010) 173-82. Arnold, writing in 1991, can perhaps be forgiven for being unaware of Weinberg’s extensive output of commemorative works. An updated catalogue of Holocaust-commemorative works is beyond the scope of this paper; indeed, such an extensive list would arguably warrant a book-length study in itself. 22 Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 13: Babi Yar, Op. 113 (Hamburg: Sikorski, 1971). 23 Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber, 2006) 410. 24 Ibid., 400. 25 See: Sergey Yakovenko, ‘Mirovaya prem’era – cherez desyatiletiya’ [A world premiere – after decades], Muzïkal’naya akademiya, 1 (2007) 60-5. 26 A Bolshoi Theatre production was arranged for 1968 but was cancelled before preparations began. 27 Dmitri Shostakovich, Foreword to ‘The Passenger’, trans. David Fanning, in programme for The Passenger, (London: English National Opera, 2011) 28-9. 28 Mieczysław Weinberg, Passazhirka [The Passenger] Piano/Vocal score, (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1974). 29 See: Klokova, ‘“Meine Moralische Pflicht” Mieczysław Weinberg und der Holocaust’. 30 M. Vaynberg [sic], ‘Tsvetï Pol’shi’ [Flowers of Poland], Sovetskaya kul’tura, (23 March 1965), cited in Lyudmila Nikitina, Simfonii M. Vaynberga [The Symphonies of Weinberg], (Moscow: Muzïka, 1972), 117, trans. Fanning, see: Fanning, Mieczysław Weinberg, 111. 31 Lyudmila Nikitina, ‘Pochti lyuboy mig zhizni – rabota’ [Nearly every moment of my life is work], Muzïkal’naya akademiya, 1994/5, 23, cited in Fanning, Mieczysław Weinberg, 117. 20