Born in Warsaw in 1919, Polish Soviet Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg lived a miraculous, if perilous life. Making his escape as the Nazi’s invaded Poland, Shostakovich took him under his wing, helping him to avoid some of the ideological snares set by Stalin’s regime.

Nevertheless, for decades Weinberg’s music was played far less than his better-known contemporary and he struggled to mount any of his seven operas, a decadent artform frowned upon as politically suspect. A series of first-class productions of The Passenger, a visionary piece of music theatre written in 1968 but waiting until 2010 for its first staged performance, revealed an out-and-out masterpiece. Now, Salzburg has staged The Idiot, Weinberg’s final opera, and on the whole it’s another revelation.

Composed in 1985, and based on Dostoyevsky’s 1869 novel, it tells the story of Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like aristocrat whose innate goodness is misinterpreted by others who see him as part idiot savant and part holy fool. Surrounded by a host of avaricious intriguers, he befriends the volatile Rogozhin, a new-made man obsessed with Nastasya, an emotionally complicated...