Prince Myshkin: Alexander Mikhailov
Nastasya Filippovna: Maria Bayankina
Aglaya: Yekaterina Sergeyeva
Rogozhin: Vladislav Sulimsky
Ganya: Alexander Trofimov
Lebedev: Dmitry Koleushko
World premiere: 19 December 1991, Moscow Chamber Opera Theatre (abridged version)
Premiere of full version: 9 May 2013, Nationaltheater, Mannheim
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre and premiere of this production: 6 July 2016
Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes
The performance has one interval
It’s not so long ago that the music by Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996) first appeared on theatres’ repertoire. The first concert performance of The Passenger, his first opera (1968), whose protagonists are a former concentration camp prisoner and her female guard, took place in 2006 in Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre. A festival dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the composer was held in England in 2009, featuring his instrumental pieces, the one-act opera Lady Magnesia and the Requiem. One year later Teodor Currentzis conducted the first performance of The Passenger at Bregenz Festival. After that, several opera theatres showed interest in Weinberg scores, especially The Passenger, The Portrait and The Idiot. Music by this "previously unknown Soviet composer" was a real revelation for Europe, while the author was soon announced to be the third greatest composer after Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
A younger contemporary of Shostakovich and an older contemporary of Schnittke, Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw. In 1939 he managed to escape and get to the Soviet Union while his entire family perished in the ghetto. The composer’s life changed greatly after meeting Shostakovich who became his friend, promoted his works and pleaded for his release when Weinberg was arrested in connection with "the Doctors' plot" in 1953. Weinberg always considered himself to be a disciple of Shostakovich, although formally he never took a single lesson from him, nor imitated his style despite the obviously strong influence of his senior colleague. While authoring more than 20 symphonies and 7 operas, he was better known to the general public for his numerous works in films and animation, including soundtracks for the famous film The Cranes Are Flying and for Winnie the Pooh cartoon series. The composer died in 1996, gaining no world fame and convinced that his music that was hardly ever performed in his lifetime, would be totally forgotten after his death.
The Idiot (1986) is the last opera by Weinberg. Four parts of the novel by Dostoevsky were transformed into four hours of music with intense symphonic development, catchy melodies and leitmotif-based structure. The story line of the opera reflects almost every twist and turn of the novel, but Prince Myshkin's disease is left in the past (the scenes showing his paroxysms, as well as the final, were not included in the libretto). Since the protagonist is preaching the composer’s own ideals, the monologues of Prince Myshkin are the only fragments of Alexander Medvedev’s libretto, that are not based on the original Dostoevsky’s text.
Performing rights: Musikverlag Hans Sikorski, Hamburg
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