Salzburg Festival

What you need to know: Weinberg’s The Idiot

The opera quick check by Larissa Schütz

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Markus Tschepp)

Whether you're on the trolley bus on the way to the performance, having a cigarette in front of the Salzburg Festival Theater or waiting in the toilet queue - with the opera quick check, you'll be perfectly prepared for the premiere in just two minutes. Part four of the series: "The Idiot" by Mieczysław Weinberg.

What is it about? "The Idiot" is not exactly one of the blockbusters of the opera world, although it has all the ingredients for one: love, obsession, murder. Weinberg and his librettist Alexander Medvedev have achieved the almost impossible and boiled down Dostoyevsky's almost thousand-page novel of the same name into a three-and-a-half-hour opera.

Plot: Prince Myshkin, a kind-hearted and naive young man, returns to St. Petersburg after a long stay in a Swiss sanatorium. On his journey home, he meets Rogozhin, who is not only very rich but also very obsessed with the beautiful Nastassya. Myshkin soon meets Nastassya and falls in love with her too. Even though Myshkin only wants to "save" the girl with the dark past, a competition breaks out over her. The appearance of the upper-class daughter Aglaja does not exactly relieve the emotional tensions. The women and Myshkin become increasingly entangled in the tangled web of hurt, obsession and inability to relate, until Rogozhin puts a cruel end to it all by murdering Nastasya.

A bit of bragging knowledge for the interval: the work was created at the end of the 1980s and was first shown in a reduced form in 1991. It was not actually premiered until 2013 in Mannheim because the conductor Thomas Sanderling stumbled across a piano score by chance. The work has only been performed a handful of times to date.