A startling new production of Alfred Schnittke's opera ‘Life with an Idiot’ directed by Kirill Serebrennikov has recently premiered in Zurich, the director’s second collaboration with the renowned Swiss Opernhaus.

Kirill Serebrennikov (b. 1969) is already familiar among Zurich audiences since his radical ‘Cosi Fan Tutti’ which he produced and rehearsed with the Opernhaus in 2018 via video link because he was living under house arrest in Moscow. Although the production has been a major hit with local theatregoers and is still included in its current repertoire, Serebrennikov is still less known in Switzerland than in Germany or Austria, where he is perceived first as a victim of the regime and then as a director (and then mostly a movie director). For local Swiss opera fans, Serebrennikov is associated with the sort of art that is shunned, if not even to be feared.

To pave the way and reassure local audiences, the Swiss press made sure to spread the word in advance that despite the controversial nationality of its director, ‘Life with an Idiot’ was not very Russian, that none of the actors were Russian and that the libretto was in German with English subtitles. The ripple of excitement that shot through the Swiss theatre community around rumours of censorship and self-censorship only cooled down at the premiere, when it became clear the director had decided to focus not on the political but on the human relevance of Alfred Schnittke's (1934-1998) ‘Life with an Idiot’, who claimed that his opera was ‘in no way only about communism’.

Schnittke wrote a musical parable about the loss of individuality in a totalitarian society, which even the first director of ‘Life with an Idiot’, Boris Pokrovsky (1912-2009) said was the only opera to reveal the true spirit of the Soviet citizen. Absurd and extremely difficult – for both orchestra and vocalists – Schnittke's work, with musical quotations from Bach and Russian songs, is based on a short story by Viktor Erofeev (b. 1947), full of sex, violence and profanity. Since its epochal premiere in Amsterdam in the spring of 1992, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), who was involved in both the creation of the opera and its first performance, and the subsequent productions that have castigated Soviet mores, the dictatorship of the proletariat and communal life, ‘Life with an Idiot’ fell out of favour in recent years, disappearing from concert hall schedules, although it remains painfully relevant today.

Serebrennikov’s desire to take on this work in particular is in itself intriguing as is the question as to how he might produce it. It turned out surprisingly to be a rather ‘vegetarian’ approach. Perhaps one might call it pure, or refined, though with glamour replacing dirt, faeces and gore (Serebrennikov was also the production designer and costume designer, assisted by Olga Pavlyuk, Tatyana Dolmatovskaya and Shalva Nikvashvili), while Soviet and any other realities related to a particular time and place gave way to metaphors and discussions about the idiocy of life in general. Instead of crude animal sex there are associative designs of intercourse, instead of fights and scuffles there are schematic gestures and symbolic dances created by choreographer Evgeny Kulagin (b. 1981), instead of lewdness there is a slightly glamorous aestheticism.

In the centre of the white-draped stage, against the background of a chorus dressed in white, commenting on the action like an ancient Greek chorus, is a transparent luminous cube, where the Idiot is locked in, as if in a cage. Or rather, not him, but his fully naked, beautifully built blond doppelganger played by actor Campbell Caspary (b. 1994), who is understandably desired by everyone around him: the dim-witted ‘I’ played by Danish baritone Bo Skovhus (b. 1962); the hysterical Wife sung by coloratura soprano Susanne Elmark (b. 1968), and perhaps even the Guardian of the madhouse played by bass Magnus Piontek (b. 1985). Only the other ‘main’ Idiot, who is dressed in black wearing a black cap, played by tenor Matthew Newlin, who can sing only ‘Eh’ but at the same time craftily manages everything that happens and looks suspiciously like Serebrennikov himself, does not appear care much about the handsome man making attractive poses.

As a result, this grey (though in this case it would be more correct to say black) cardinal, who cannot even speak, drives the whole family crazy and completely destroys their lives. The wife, who loves the books of the French writer Marcel Proust, has her head cut off with pruning shears; ‘I’ goes mad and again – as at the beginning of the action – finds himself in a madhouse, only now it is not he who chooses the Idiot, but he himself is classed as one of them, having previously been accused of murdering his wife. At this point everyone sitting in the auditorium realises that one small inconspicuous Idiot, who looks quite innocent, has seized power and destroyed life not just in one single apartment, but far beyond it.

So, the performance, which looks at first like a traditional play about the crisis of family relations, unmotivated aggression and the horrors of everyday life, suddenly turns out to be a non-banal story about evil spilled in the world and people's inability (or unwillingness) to resist it. Of course, such a story can not leave the audience indifferent, and the further on it goes, the more macabre it becomes. As a result, the production team, the orchestra led by conductor Jonathan Stockhammer (b. 1964), the soloists, choristers and, of course, the writer of the libretto were given a long, if not thunderous, applause at the premiere, which gives us every reason to believe that Serebrennikov will keep coming back to the Opernhaus Zürich.