Der Idiot at Nationaltheater Mannheim

Young prince Myschkin returns destitute to St. Petersburg after a stay of many years in a clinic in Switzerland, and in the train meets wealthy Rogoshin, who is driven by a dark passion for Nastassja, a »fallen« woman. The unstable prince, removed from reality due to his illness and naïvely believing in the goodness of people, and who is branded a kind of Russian Don Quichotte, also falls for Nastassja, but in a different way. He wants to save her. Caught up between her and young Aglaja, he himself becomes embroiled in a network of material and sexual dependency, of injuries, obsession and the inability to relate to others, which eventually ends with Rogoshin’s murder of Nastassja. Myschkin grows stiff in the arms of the murderer, in a state between madness and tenderness.

The Idiot, written in 1986/1987, was Mieczys?aw Weinberg’s final opera, and until now has only been performed in a reduced version. Weinberg’s Idiot sets Dostoevsky »polyphonic« novel of the same name into an erratic sequence of images on a multiple stage, which also includes epic commentaries. The Polish-Jewish composer Weinberg (1919?-?1996), who lost his family at the hands of the Nazis, fled to Russia where he later became a victim of Stalinist persecution, was until recently one of the unjustly forgotten composers of the 20th century. He left behind a considerable number of works, and since an impressive renaissance in recent years, he is considered, next to Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as one of the most important composers of the Soviet Union.