Weinberg's The Idiot

"There are times," writes Shirley Apthorp in a five-star rave for the Financal Times, "when you leave the opera house unable to speak. When the combination of text, music, motion and imagery reaches a level of such complex perfection that you can’t find words for the way you feel… The Idiot is so good that it hurts. See it if you can." On medici.tv, you can watch and rewatch this production that "gets everything right"!

In this new staging from the 2024 Salzburg Festival, illustrious director Krzysztof Warlikowski offers an original mise en scène of Mieczysław Weinberg's lesser-known gem The Idiot, featuring Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov as the delicate Prince Myshkin — a man whose profound goodness is cruelly misunderstood by the 19th-century Russian upper crust — alongside Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė as the troubled and beautiful Nastasia Filippovna. Weinberg's score is brought to vivid life by the world-class Vienna Philharmonic, led here by the marvelous Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with a "command and sophistication well beyond her years."

Written in the 1980s, Weinberg's The Idiot is a brilliant adaptation of the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Polish-Soviet composer, a longtime friend of Shostakovich, created his last great opera on a libretto by Alexander Medvedev, which admirably captures the dense and complex intrigue of this well-known masterpiece of Russian literature.

Photo © Salzburg Festival / Bernd Uhlig