Z Mrtvého Domu

Deep in Siberia, the inmates of a prison camp awake to another freezing day. It’s much like any other in their long exile: chains clank, orders are shouted, beatings are given. Despite everything, the convicts find time to tell stories and share gossip—there are rumours that a new prisoner, the political dissident Goryanchikov, is to arrive at the camp. But he’s only one man in a vast, cruel system, and he’s promptly flogged. The other prisoners have their own fears, secrets and tales to tell: human beings at their lowest ebb, but still, despite everything, human beings. For Janáček, that was the whole point of his last opera, From the House of the Dead. “There is a spark of the divine in every creature,” he wrote on the score, and at the very end of his extraordinary operatic career, he turned his love of Russian literature—in this case, Dostoyevsky—into an opera unlike any other. The score was incomplete when Janáček died in 1928, and he never saw its premiere in 1930. But the predominantly male cast gives From the House of the Dead an atmosphere entirely its own, with music of bristling energy and dark, passionate power. Janáček never sugar-coats his characters’ plight. Instead, he finds hope amid raw honesty: a hymn to the human spirit that’s all the more stirring for being so unexpected.