The poetry of daze and the sudden wit are what most captivate people about Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera “The Idiot” at the Salzburg Festival. When Bogdan Volkov, as Prince Myshkin, sits alone on the huge stage of the Felsenreitschule, staring into the darkness around him and singing in a half-voice, childishly bright: “What a breathless, strange day. Everything rushes and flickers before my eyes,” then you can feel what Weinberg’s music has captured about this character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel: it gains clarity about the world by becoming quiet in the midst of the noise.
But twice the audience bursts into laughter because the joke jumps out of the play like a robber from the bush. And both times the jokes are credited to Margarita Nekrasova as Elizaveta Prokofievna Epanchina. The first time is when the general’s wife fraternizes with the newcomer Myshkin: “Yes, you are right, I am a childlike soul. You and I, we have the same soul, only you are a man and I am a woman.” Stormy, motherly affection in the form of lecturing. Then, later, the magnificent lament: “I have three marriageable daughters, and they all tend towards nihilism.”
Nekrasova is in a class of her own
Nekrasova, who was on stage in Moscow at the end of May as Brangäne in “Tristan and Isolde”, delivers these lines so precisely that the people in the hall burst out laughing. She plays and sings this defensive but kind matron – wonderfully underlined by a plum-colored silk dress with diamond bling that the set designer Małgorzata Szczęśniak came up with for her – with comedy, but without making the character ridiculous. Nekrasova – a Kathy Bates of the opera stage – shows that this woman has wisdom within her, notices the madness of the world and is actually related to Myshkin in this respect. She is in a class of her own!
With Prokofievna, Dostoyevsky created one of the most delightful female characters in Russian literature, and of course with the conversation scenes at the tea table of this matriarch he achieved what he detested in his contemporary Ivan Turgenev: a brilliant piece of “landowner literature”. When boorish revolutionaries in the novel The Idiot mock Prince Myshkin for giving them money, this also repeats the constellation of Turgenev, who in his generosity paid off Dostoyevsky’s gambling debts in Germany. Dostoyevsky never paid them back, but instead mocked his rescuer. There is a lot of unresolved self-hatred in Dostoyevsky’s novel.
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But neither the political confrontation between left-wing arrogance and aristocratic magnanimity nor the struggle between Christianity and atheism, fear of death and hope of resurrection, pangs of conscience and mockery of any kind of devotion to duty are reflected in the opera that Weinberg wrote in 1986/87 in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.
Alexander Medvedev’s libretto leaves little of the polyphonic reflections other than an erotic foursome: a man between two women, namely Prince Myshkin between Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and Aglaya Ivanovna Yepanchina, and then a woman between two men, namely Nastasya Filippovna between Myshkin and Parfjon Semyonovich Rogozhin. Dramaturgically, this turns a complex book into a mediocre heart-wrenching farce with a final murder of a woman, a dime a dozen on the opera stage.
Warlikowski brings Christ into play
The director in Salzburg, Krzysztof Warlikowski, probably found this too thin. That is why he staged Hans Holbein’s painting “The Dead Christ in the Tomb”, which plays a major role in the novel, but is completely absent in the opera, where every hint of Christianity was erased as a concession to late Soviet state atheism. In addition, Volkov, as Myshkin, lies almost naked on the stage, wearing only a loincloth, parallel to the painting, which reinforces Dostoyevsky’s idea that Myshkin is a modern reincarnation of Christ. But this parallelization remains a moment without consequence.
A director like Timofei Kulyabin, who in March of this year staged a brilliant reading of Peter Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” at the Lyon Opera, might have thought of a different way of showing Dostoyevsky’s spiritual imperialism on stage. In his “Confessions of a Slavophile” in the summer of 1873, the writer admitted that “our great Russia, at the head of the united Slavs, will speak its new, healthy word, as yet unheard by the world, to all of European humanity and its civilization.” And Myshkin is a prophet of this word.
Dostoyevsky is a vampire
Warlikowski describes Dostoyevsky as a vampire – but only in the programme booklet. He fails to address this on stage. The opening scene on the train is certainly stimulating: Kamil Polak’s videos with different layers of the landscape moving past at different speeds and then even changing direction capture something of the different directions and speeds in the characters’ experience of time. The polyvectorial time of the novel becomes a clear image.
Aušrinė Stundytė has exactly the right, overwhelming voice for the self-destructive ardor of Nastassja Filippovna. Like Vladislav Sulimsky as Rogozhin, who is demonic and at the same time humiliated by his own desires, she is one of the world’s top performers. Volkov’s vulnerable lyricism as Myshkin conveys very beautifully that this person suffers when others mutilate themselves mentally.
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in such a way that the balance is right and everyone feels comfortable. But she does not unleash a drama. Unlike Thomas Sanderling, who conducted the world premiere in Mannheim in 2013 and the Austrian premiere in Vienna in 2023, she cannot find a tone for the painful and devastating nature of this music; she does manage the lyrical aspect quite well, however. Overall, however, “The Idiot” does not live up to its potential.
