Both composers wrote about war, but Weinberg was more direct in his language. Even when he employed irony, it didn’t have Shostakovich’s bite. Weinberg’s music is too defiantly in search of serenity; often, his works end not with a grand finale, but with prayerful calm. The last movement of his 21st Symphony, “Kaddish,” is defined by a wordless soprano vocalise both mournful and healing, more interested in moving forward than wallowing in pain.
Weinberg’s sincerity, however, is also his biggest fault. Particularly in his large-scale works, the lyricism and relentless expressivity can grow wearisome; the sense of drama can come off as kitsch despite its personal roots. His first opera, “The Passenger,” written in the late 1960s but not performed until 2006, is partially set at the Auschwitz death camp, which is depicted with an obvious terror that, combined with music written to appeal to Soviet censors, makes the work clunky, and difficult to perform as written.
When “The Passenger” was staged at the Bavarian State Opera in Germany earlier this year, the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, and the director, Tobias Kratzer, created their own version with about 30 minutes in cuts that improved it, and even made it a success, with critics and audiences alike. Most of their trims were to the Auschwitz scenes. They let the pain of its memory speak through the characters.
At Salzburg, there were no cuts to “The Idiot,” Weinberg’s last opera, which already whittles the Dostoyevsky novel that inspired it down to its essence, asking the question: What rules the world, compassion or evil?
Dostoyevsky’s novel, written more in conversations than descriptions, lends itself to opera. Alexander Medvedev’s libretto tells more or less the same story, at a different pace, though with the loss of some characters, including the hapless invalid Ippolit. Weinberg’s score has a postmodern freedom, nodding to Debussy in its vocal writing and Wagner in its motivic clarity. There are soliloquies but no arias in the traditional sense; the plot moves breathlessly forward through cinematic gestures, briefly interrupted now and then by grotesqueries and Lynchian interjections.
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