Witness Bearing in Holocaust Musical Presentation: Confronting Trauma in Mieczysław Weinberg’s Opera 'The Passenger'

Abstract

In a letter to his second wife, Polish Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg wrote: “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…” As the sole survivor of his Jewish family, Weinberg dedicated a large part of his compositional career to the memorialization of the trauma born of World War II and the Holocaust. According to Wlodarski (2015) Holocaust themed worked function as “secondary musical witnesses,” prompting composers, performers, and audience members to collectively bear witness to trauma. This dissertation advances scholarship on the musically mediated transference of trauma by expanding Wlodarski’s framework to include artists and institutions, with Weinberg’s 1968 Holocaust opera The Passenger as a paradigmatic case study.Adapted from the 1962 eponymous Polish novel by Auschwitz survivor and journalist Zofia Posmysz, The Passenger follows the collision between Lisa, a Holocaust perpetrator, and Marta, a Holocaust survivor, within two separate temporal-spatial planes: a ship bound for Brazil in 1960, and the concentration camp of Auschwitz in 1944. This dissertation approaches the opera from two angles, one historical, the other contemporary: (1) as a musical score that reflects the decision-making process by its librettist and composer as they adapted the novel; and (2) as an example of a living operatic performance that embodies the experiences of its artists as it is framed by its producing institutions and acts upon its changing audiences. Using methodologies of literary criticism, adaptation theory, musical analysis, ethnography, and analysis of visual, print, and digital media archives, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in opera and performance studies, music and trauma studies, and Holocaust studies. It is also designed to serve as a resource for institutions and individual artists who perform or stage Holocaust repertoire.