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The new productions that Jurowski has led in Munich include Shostakovich’s satirical “The Nose,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov while he was still under house arrest in Russia; Penderecki’s “The Devils of Loudun,” an allegorical tragedy about fanaticism that read in the moment as a warning against cancel culture; and Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov as an indictment of Russian nationalism after the invasion of Ukraine.

In interviews, he seemed more comfortable discussing his love of 20th-century composers like Morton Feldman and Krzysztof Penderecki than chatting about his rock-and-roll contemporaries.

Verlaine was passionate about harmonically complex music, especially jazz saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, the classical compositions of Henryk Gorecki and Krzysztof Penderecki, and film composers Bernard Herrmann and Henry Mancini, as well as literature, especially the French symbolists of the late 1800s.

The German translation of that stage work, by Erich Fried, is the basis for Penderecki’s text, which bends the material even further toward allegory à la “The Crucible,” making a martyr of Grandier and subtly connecting his tragedy to the repression and conspiratorial violence of 20th-century totalitarianism, as in his country, Poland.

Penderecki’s opera, though, is the kind of art that we avoid at our own peril.