Raskolnikoff

Heinrich Sutermeister’s fourth opera is based on Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in which Dostoyevsky relates the murder of a pawnbroker by the student Raskolnikov as a cold blooded, pre-planned crime. Raskolnikov wants to prove to himself that he, being an exceptional person, is able to commit the perfect crime while keeping his calm and a clear perspective. Only his lover Sonya who supports herself and her family by working as a prostitute, convinces him to turn himself in and atone for the murder. Sutermeister changed the main storyline in one important aspect: in the opera, the eponymous hero Raskolnikov is a man driven by self-doubt and visions, who is shadowed by the ‘demon of discord within himself’ as a second superior self who can only be overcome by atonement.