Paraphrasen über Dostojewski

Hans Werner Henze’s work Paraphrasen über Dostojewski (1990) is based on his earlier pantomime ballet Der Idiot. The ‘mimodrama’ received its first performance in Berlin in 1952 with no other than Klaus Kinski in the role of Prince Myshkin. The following year, Henze replaced the text of Dostoyevsky quotations with Ingeborg Bachmann’s A monologue of Prince Myshkin, marking the beginning of a longstanding cooperation. The Paraphrasen über Dostojewski is a concert adaptation of this second version which, with the narrator’s extensive monologues and the absence of dancers, takes on the characteristics of a melodrama, while the lively music ingeniously retains the dance element.