Lyric Opera Lecture: The Passenger

The Lyric Opera of Chicago will present its premiere staging of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger on February 24. Suppressed for more than 40 years, Weinberg's gripping opera has emerged anew, electrifying audiences at Austria's Bregenz Festival and again in Warsaw and London. Set in the early 1960s aboard an ocean liner, the plot centers around a West German diplomat, Walter, and his wife Liese, who are bound for a new posting in Brazil. Unbeknownst to her husband, Liese served as an SS officer in Auschwitz. Haunted by her past, she is stunned when she thinks she recognizes a fellow passenger as her former prisoner.

Be fully prepared to appreciate this masterwork by joining Roy Fisher of the Lyric’s Community Lecture Corps, who will present a program on it at the library on Tuesday, February 17 at 1:00 p.m.