Medvedev's libretto[2] is based on the 1959 Polish radio play Pasażerka z kabiny 45 (Passenger from Cabin Number 45) by concentration-camp survivor Zofia Posmysz.
Medvedev's libretto was reworked in 2010 for the first staged performance of the opera at the Bregenzer Festspiele into German, English, Polish, Yiddish, French, Russian and Czech.
(Russian: Пассажирка, romanized: Passazhirka)[1] Medvedev's libretto[2] is based on the 1959 Polish radio play Pasażerka z kabiny 45 (Passenger from Cabin Number 45) by concentration-camp survivor Zofia Posmysz.
Posmysz also worked with Andrzej Munk on the screenplay for his related, posthumously finished 1963 film Pasażerka.
Medvedev's libretto was reworked in 2010 for the first staged performance of the opera at the Bregenzer Festspiele into German, English, Polish, Yiddish, French, Russian and Czech.
It was premiered by musicians of the Stanislavsky Theatre in the Svetlanov Hall of the Moscow International House of Music on 25 December 2006, in a semi-staging conducted by Wolf Gorelik.
[5] The first full staging took place in 2010 at the Bregenzer Festspiele, directed by David Pountney, with a set design by Johan Engels.
[14] Orchestra: Banda: The opera is set on two levels: the upper level depicts the deck of an ocean liner after the Second World War where a German couple, Lisa and Walter (a West German diplomat on his way with his new wife to a new diplomatic posting), are sailing to Brazil.
A Russian woman is brought in having been beaten and tortured and the Kapo in charge discovers a note which may cost her her life.
Marta is selected by Lisa to translate it, but deliberately makes it out to be a love letter from her partner Tadeusz, with whom she had been deported to the camp, but who she has not seen these past two years.
He now returns to add that although she is travelling on a British passport, she is not English and is on deck reading a Polish book.
This musical coincidence and the still unknown identity of the passenger further convinces Lisa that Marta is somehow alive and on the boat.
Lisa is reduced to terror and shrinks from sight of the mystery passenger retreating from her down the stairs of the liner into the horrors of Tadeusz's final moments.
Epilogue : The stage becomes completely empty apart from Lisa still in her ballgown who slumps down sitting to the rear silently.