Der Idiot - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Opera in four acts by
Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Libretto by Alexander Medvedev
Austrian premiere

The mentally ill Prince Myshkin has lost all sense of reality and has an unshakable belief in the good. On the train journey that takes him back to St. Petersburg after a stay in a sanatorium, he meets the merchant Rogozhin, which entails a game of dependency, madness and murder. Weinberg's last opera is based on the novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - the plot is compressed, exaggerated and theatricalized without reducing the psychological subtlety of the literary original. In view of this successful adaptation, one cannot help but be amazed: how could the works of the Russian composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 – 1996) have fallen into oblivion? He has only been rediscovered for a good ten years and seen as the equal of his friend Dmitri Shostakovich. Der Idiot, composed between 1986 and 1989, had its world premiere in Mannheim in 2013 and is now on the program in Vienna for the first time in Austria in a production by the Russian director Vasily Barkhatov. World literature on the opera stage.


In Russian with surtitles

musical direction
Michael Boder

staging
Vasily Barkhatov

stage
Christian Schmidt

costume
Stefanie Seitz

light
Alexander Sivaev

dramaturgy
Christian Schröder

Fürst Myschkin
Dmitry Golovnin

Natassja
Natalya Pavlova

Rogoshin
Kostas Smoriginas

Lebedjew
Petr Sokolov

General Jepantschin
Valery Gilmanov

Jepantschina
Ksenia Vyaznikova

Aglaja
Ieva Prudnikovaitė

Alexandra
Tatjana Schneider

Totzki
Alexey Dedov



ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Arnold Schoenberg Choir (conductor: Erwin Ortner)


Subject to change.