Not so heroic

Encouraged by the film of The Passenger, left unfinished with director Andrzej Munk's untimely death in 1961, I looked out more Munk on DVD. Eroica (1957) is a strange little diptych about anti-heroic in the Second World War, its symphonic rhythms ironically evoking Beethoven. The artwork on the Czech DVD combines both elements more successfully than the cheap, American-based Polart copy I was nevertheless pleased to pick up for a small sum.


Of the two 'movements', Scherzo alla Polacca translates least well, I think, to a non-Polish viewer; there's a kind of humour here verging on the clownish which I didn't quite get, though I like the basic premise of a small-time black marketeer who drinks too much and gets caught up with the Resistance. Edward Dziewonski's slightly less than loveable rogue wanders into all sorts of scenarios where explosions and sudden murders seem almost incidental to his trivial preoccupations.


Ostinato lugubre, on the other hand, is haunting. The murderous monotony of life in a prisoner-of-war camp is intensified in a plot where the inmates need to believe in the heroism of an officer who supposedly escaped but is, in fact, hiding above a false ceiling in the barracks. The desperation of his insubordinate friend triggers the inevitable tragedy. In no way does this connect with the first 'movement' other than in its contrasting darkness. But its atmosphere is unique, and as with The Passenger one can only be aware of the film's proximity in time to the events it dramatises. There's a score by Jan Krenz very much of its era, but once it's set the mood of each 'movement' it plays discreet second fiddle to Munk's singular brand of realism.

Munk's Passenger

Weinberg's opera The Passenger is, as we've seen for ourselves, an admirable, honourable attempt to grapple with the human issues of Auschwitz: what keeps the soul alive in an inmate, how strong are the instincts both for freedom and to forget (especially in the oppressor). It has, as I've insisted - and some won't even grant it that - masterly scenes, but overall still seems to me too unwieldy for anything like masterpiece status. Whereas I'd be far more inclined to bandy that phrase about with respect to the (absolutely non-operatic) film by Andrzej Munk now available on Second Run DVD. It's much closer - as the author said to me when we met at the London Coliseum on the opera's opening night - to Sofia Posmysz's original autobiographical novel. Its unfinished status raises more questions than answers; Munk was killed in a car crash on his way to Lodz to look at film designs on 21 September 1961, shortly before what would have been his 40th birthday. To complete a necessary memorial, Andrzej Borowski filmed extra scenes in Auschwitz, while the portion of the drama set on the liner Batory, where former SS overseer Liese Alexandra Slaska, pictured below) comes face to face with her spiritually indomitable one-time charge Marta, had been shot but not to Munk's satisfaction; so stills alone were used - incredibly effectively - against a commentary written by two Polish School acolytes. The result is that it's the present which seems unreal, while the mundane brutality of the camp comes across in all its chilling casualness, heightened by the almost unbearable use of the site 15 or so years after its abandonment. Chinks in the guards' armour are briefly evoked with the subtlety that only cinema can convey: Liese's expression suddenly changes from hard to worried as she looks through the fence at people on their way to the gas chambers; later, in a close-up on one such processional, a young soldier lets a little girl stroke his Alsatian dog, and again for a moment his face softens before he realises what he's supposed to be doing. Marta, who of course has such a strong and radiant voice in the opera, hardly speaks. Yet when, processing past a woman being ritually humiliated to stand semi-naked, she says 'head up!', it's all we need to know about her sense of pride and refusal to bow to Liese's 'help'. Marta is superbly played, with nearly all expression in the eyes, by Ewa Mazierska. Liese's account of their relationship, in the present editing, seems to unfold in two narrative flashbacks: once as soft-pedalled economy with the truth, the second time to reveal the sadism which develops from her own sense of not being loved, as Marta is by Tadeusz. This, too, is summed up in a single moment - when she enviously takes the flowers sent to Marta on her birthday, and walks away along the fence with them. It's all accountable only moment by moment, and I'm still left wondering exactly what the trajectory of Posmysz's book might be. Which means that we have to fight all the harder to get it translated into English, as we discussed with her interpreter at the reception before the ENO premiere. Anyway, here the lady is, so elegantly dressed and gracious, in much-needed colour after all that harsh black and white. And you can hear Weinberg's The Passenger in a recording from the Bregenz Festival (which means, in German, Russian, French, English, which all serve it well) on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 6pm. I mull over opera and film with Andrew McGregor before and between the acts. Curiously, tonight BBC 4 also screens Terry Gilliam's much more questionable, but fitfully brilliant, holocaust-related ENO production of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.

The ace

No question about the top choice in Radio 3's Building a Library this time - and don't read on if you still have to hear it on the BBC iPlayer - which, if you live in the UK only, I'm told, applies for the next five days - and don't want to know the outcome. We're not allowed to say 'winner', and usually I end with two or three versions with which I'd be equally happy for different reasons. But tenor Georgi Nelepp (pictured above) would be enough to stake out the 1952 recording of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades as easily the best.

His sensitivity, even production, characterisation and fabulous diction leave Atlantov - a more heldentenory Hermann on no less than three recordings, if you like that sort of thing, which I did at the end of the first scene and throughout the last - Grigorian (for Gergiev) and the rather interesting Peter Gougaloff (for Rostropovich) way behind. Grigorian, by the way, wore a powdered wig like the one Nelepp sports below in the very traditional Mariinsky Queen of Spades I saw in St. Petersburg, but was allowed to take it off, I seem to remember, for the filming, as it had turned him rather into the Frog Footman of Lewis Carroll's Duchess.


Decisive in the choice, though, was Melik-Pashayev's conducting: incredibly nuanced, getting superb articulation from the Bolshoi Orchestra and pacing unerringly. For once, the Pastoral of the Faithful Shepherdess that falls like a true 18th century intermezzo halfway through the opera doesn't outstay its welcome. Other recordings may have even better Tomskys and Yeletskys (Leiferkus and Hvorostovsky for Ozawa), but none comes close overall.


If you want the classic, you'll have to buy the 60-CD Tchaikovsky Edition, but it's to be found, I'm told, in some places for less than a pound a disc. There are other operatic rarities - The Oprichnik, The Maid of Orleans, The Slippers and The Enchantress are all here - though inevitably the performances are variable. I've just been listening to the Ansermet versions of the ballets which, though often cut, have such esprit.


Briefly, then, more Russian stuff this week. Tonight I interview the Pacifica Quartet (pictured above by Anthony Parmelee) in a Wigmore pre-performance event before the launch of their Shostakovich cycle; and next Saturday I plague the airwaves again, talking to Andrew McGregor about Weinberg's The Passenger before a Radio 3 relay of the Bregenz premiere. But the highlight of the week is somehow bound to be the two-concert appearance at the Festival Hall of the world's greatest living conductor, Claudio Abbado, with the world's greatest players, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Why you must see The Passenger

It's an Auschwitz opera, but it could hardly be more responsible or unsensational in its approach. Zofia Posmysz, the Polish woman on whose novella it's based, was indeed interned in the camp and years later heard what she thought was the voice of her former tormentor in a group of German tourists on the Place de la Concorde (it wasn't, but she based her flashback technique on a 'what if?'). Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the composer, otherwise known as Moisey Vainberg, followed in his father's footsteps as a musician in Warsaw's Yiddish theatre, fled to the Soviet Union while his parents and sister were sent to the camps, and was imprisoned in the last year of Stalin's reign for 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' (his father-in-law had been Solomon Mikhoels, whose fate he was spared only by Stalin's death).

So both had a right to such an opera. That wouldn't in itself make The Passenger great, and in the relatively cold light of twice viewing the Bregenz premiere on DVD - the first time to review for the BBC Music Magazine, the second time with a score to write a programme note - I still can't say with certainty that it is, at least by the conventional canons of operatic masterpiece status. Too much, perhaps, lives under the shadow of Weinberg's inspirational father-figure mentor Shostakovich (I argue in the programme, or rather speculate, since there's so little hard evidence, on the presence of a third voice who would certainly have been presented on a regular basis to Weinberg by Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten).


Yet what struck me especially on a second hearing was how restrained much of the musical invention is. It doesn't thrust itself on you with any false pathos; it only really breaks its leash in the impassioned love music between the imprisoned Sofia-figure, Marta, and the lover she's reunited with, Tadeusz. It places its dissonant climaxes very carefully; it makes use of a life-and-death tension between cheap music and Bach (a departure from the source). Its dramaturgical arches see the banality of evil ultimately wiped clean, or at least dwarfed into insignificance, by the voice that will never forget.


Above all it demands total integrity from its cast. Michelle Breedt, picture above right in the third of the Karl Forster photos from the Bregenz premiere, will surely be as magnificent at ENO - the eight-performance run starts tonight - as she was at Bregenz. Giselle Allen sings the other woman, originally sung by Elena Kelessidi (on the left). There are superb roles for a whole ensemble of women, whose barracks scenes remind me of the integrated acting in Sovremennik's vintage staging of Yevgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind. And David Pountney, knowing better than to exploit his recent trademark crazy crowd scenes, directs with restraint on Johan Engels's perfect set.

I'm facing tonight's UK premiere with just a little knot inside, but I know it's going to be quality work. I'm sure, too, that the opera itself will justify the five two-hour classes we're going to spend on it in my Opera in Focus course at the City Lit, starting this afternoon. Lucky that I have a full house of students willing to follow me into such arcane repertoire...


On a connected note, I spoke on the phone yesterday to Thomas Sanderling about the death, just before his 99th birthday which would have been today, of his remarkable conductor father Kurt. I needed to check some facts in my Guardian obituary, and though I gave him the option of not being disturbed, he rang me to talk about his father's last days and to read through the piece (which made me very, very nervous - needlessly, as it turned out).

Both Sanderlings have been intimately connected with Weinberg's work; the composer dedicated his Second Symphony to Sanderling Vater. Now Thomas is embarking on what he feels passionately sure IS an operatic masterpiece, Weinberg's treatment - with the same librettist, Alexander Medvedev - of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. He's going to play through scenes from the piano score to convince me. So the wonderful continuity of the musical world goes on...

Stop press, 20/9: The Passenger was, as predicted, done by ENO at the very highest level. Fret though I may about what might be the authentic voice of Weinberg, there were huge strengths throughout and, yes, the epilogue was quietly affecting. Review here on The Arts Desk. And I got to shake the venerable hand of elegant Zofia Posmysz...