Salzburg Festival: Opera “The Idiot”: Be a human being

The circumstances in Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera “The Idiot” are confused and destructive. Fortunately, neither Weinberg’s score nor Krzysztof Warlikowski’s direction dwell much on the trials and tribulations in the personal tableau of Dostoyevsky’s novel. Rather, they focus on the personality of Prince Myshkin: he is at best an idiot in that he treats the crazy society with astonishment and a rejection of realpolitik.

Myshkin, congenially personified by Bogdan Volkov with admirable singing and fascinating acting, is more of a naive, somewhat strange, fragile fool, a Candide to whom the world is a stranger and who always tells the truth. Varlikowski’s Myshkin represents a positive utopia; he has ideals; for him, for example, mercy is “the only law of humanity” (in addition to the laws of physics, perhaps; he repeatedly writes formulas from Newton or Einstein on a huge blackboard). He maintains a childlike, amazed look and believes that humanity can be healed through beauty. “The only form of countering hatred is art, civilization,” writes the dramaturg Christian Longchamp in an essay in the excellent program book.

Warlikowski goes so far as to associate Myshkin with Jesus. After his long epileptic seizure – the dark, wild, roaring music of Weinberg is incredible and the way Volkov rolls around on the floor, twitching lost and never wanting to end, is incredible! – we see Myschkin lying half-naked in a Jesus pose in front of the Holbein painting “The Body of Christ in the Grave” projected onto the wall. Even though this image is evoked by Dostoyevsky, who describes Holbein’s paintings in detail in his novel, I found it too heavy-handed in the production.

However, with this association, Warlikowski poses legitimate and, not least, very current questions: What do the values ​​of the Sermon on the Mount actually mean to us today? Love of neighbor, love of enemies, desire for peace? What do basic Christian values ​​apply at a time when “war-fighting skills” are demanded everywhere? Warlikowski’s Prince Myshkin is a God fool, i.e. “the one who goes out into the world naked” (Longchamp), and he painfully reminds us that, especially after the experiences of the 20th century, humanity should be able to get along without wars, without murder, etc Homicide. But the conditions are not like that.

Why did Weinberg take on this material of all things? Weinberg, who was born in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Moscow in 1996, was a Jewish-Polish survivor who was the only member of his family to escape extermination by the National Socialists and who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Shostakovich stood up for his close friend. In the Soviet Union, every child knew Weinberg thanks to his popular film scores for cartoons such as “Winnie the Pooh” or “The Holidays of Boniface”; but he also wrote the music for films like “The Cranes Are Moving”.

Obviously, not only Auschwitz but also the “disaster of war” played a life-defining role for Weinberg, to which he devoted himself in his late work. »Is he the idiot? Is Weinberg the idiot in Russia? Is the idiot the artist who doesn’t understand the political madness that surrounds him? The decision to set this novel to music was the decision of a Jew. It was the decision of an outsider,” says the philosopher and dramatist Longchamp.

Does Weinberg have answers to the problems of our day? And if so, why do we fear them? At one point Weinberg sings: “It’s all about being human. To be a human being.” “Be a human being,” “Be a human being, hob rachmuness” (have compassion) – in Yiddish, this demand refers to a loving and sensitive person who acts with integrity, tolerance and mercy.

The cast of characters in this opera is immense and all roles are excellently cast at the Salzburg Festival. Everyone seems to be inescapably entangled in their existence and cannot find their way out of their fateful spider web. Not Rogozhin, the prince’s friend and competitor in his love for Nastassya. Not Nastassja, who sometimes seems to play with her admirers and enjoys being the center of attention – the party scene she dominates with jazz-like club piano music is adorable – but who is ultimately the tragic figure, doomed to misfortune. She doesn’t want to accept a “solution” that the lying society offers her, neither as a mistress nor as a lover or princess (Myshkin ultimately offers her marriage out of pity). This is where the plot becomes uncomfortably anti-feminist. Myshkin sees a picture of Nastassja, we see the slide thrown large on the wall: Nastassja with bright make-up, her lips blood-red, her eyes blue, as no eyes can be blue. The prince actually becomes a fool, a love idiot, “this portrait is enchantingly beautiful,” and he promptly falls into the Tamino trap and falls in love with this woman’s photo (conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla points out that already At the beginning of the opera, after the voluminous clusters, a pure E flat major chord can be heard, reminiscent of “The Magic Flute”).

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Nastassja, who describes herself as “one from the street,” is the ultimate male projection surface. The scene in which all the disgusting men haggle over her is full of cruelty. Weinberg wrote some really terrible music for it: Ganja, who received a lot of money from the cheerful capitalist Totzki in order to convince her; Rogozhin, who assures Nastassya that he will raise a lot more money for her than his rival, who offers more? Prince Myshkin is outraged and asks Nastassja if she isn’t ashamed of being treated like a commodity (but he doesn’t ask the men what they are imagining about treating her like a commodity). Finally, Rogozhin obtains an enormous amount of money from a choir of stockbrokers, which Nastassja, in an act of self-empowerment and attempted liberation, throws into the fire when she sets off with Rogozhin.

Perhaps Aglaja is the truly tragic character in this opera. She is a self-confident and educated woman, thinks for a long time about whether she wants to marry the prince, makes smart decisions and sings a wonderful aria, but in the end she fails despite everything. She is probably the only one who actually understands Myshkin, the idiot, and admires his human demeanor. She wants to set off with him and do what is useful to society. “You always want to make peace between everyone,” she says to him. He is just a dreamer. You may say I’m a dreamer – sure, but what’s so bad about that? The idiot as the representative of humanity, as an unconditional humanist. Let’s hope with John Lennon that he really isn’t “the only one.”

In the end, Rogozhin commits femicide and kills Nastassya. In the final scene, he and the prince each lie down in bed on one side of the dead woman. »Nastassja, 25 years old. She leaves him. He’s killing her,” was written like a threatening sign on the stage wall at the beginning of the performance.

“The Idiot” is a tremendous opera. It is strange and disturbing and at the same time incredibly fascinating and impressive. The music is full of longing, then again terrible and dissonant, sometimes darkly threatening, as befits a MeToo soundtrack. Sometimes infernal, sometimes beguiling, always extremely versatile. The threatening drums that know about all the confusion in advance and announce it. The leitmotif xylophone and glockenspiel. Wonderful clarinet tones when Myschkin listens to himself, or a weightless flute motif when Myschkin sings about nature and beauty. But also powerful brass and shrill police siren fifths when Myshkin is about to be killed, which are resolved into lovely chords of friendship between Myshkin and Rogozhin.

And again and again an extremely sensual, late romantic sound that the Gražinytė-Tyla conjures up from the magnificent Vienna Philharmonic – even if one sometimes wishes for more drama and bulkiness, which is certainly inherent in the score, as can be seen from Thomas Sanderling’s conducting of the first unabridged performance of this opera in Mannheim in 2013 (also on CD). But Gražinytė-Tyla sees this composition as being closer to Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which is of course also a plausible interpretation.

The ensemble of singers shines without exception: In addition to the unsurpassed lyric tenor Bogdan Volkov as Myschkin, there is the dramatic and vehemently playful Aušrinė Stundytė as Nastassja, the wonderful mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas as Aglaja, Vladislav Sulkimsky as the expressive Rogozhin and Iurii Samoilov as the impressive Lebedev to highlight. The latter repeatedly explains and comments on the progression of the story and sometimes drives things forward in an almost diabolical manner. A brilliant and celebrated Salzburg opera premiere.

At the end, the E flat major chord from the beginning is played again, but this time with the disturbing tritone note A. Can the world be saved through beauty?

Further performances: August 11th, 15th, 18th and 23rd

www.salzburgerfestspiele.at

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