From the House of the Dead is the last opera by Leos Janacek (1854-1928). It was composed in 1927-28 and first performed in 1930 in Brno (Czechoslovakia then, now Czech Republic). The opera is based on the book by the same name, which was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s memoir of the 5 years he spent as a political prisoner in Siberia. Janacek chose episodes from Dostoevsky’s book, translated them into Czech and arranged them into an opera libretto.

The opera has almost no plot. It begins with the arrival of a political prisoner, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov (a stand-in for Dostoevsky); it ends with Goryanchikov’s release. In between the prisoners go about their daily chores, chat, argue, befriend one another, drink tea, and stage an amateur theatrical. All these events are taken from anecdotes in Dostoevsky’s book. Most of all the prisoners tell the stories of the crimes that got them sent to Siberia. There are three long narratives: Luka tells how he attacked and killed an official who oppressed the prisoners; Skuratov explains that he shot a German watchmaker whom his sweetheart was forced to marry against her will; Shishkov beat his young wife repeatedly, then cut her throat in a drunken rage. These narratives would seem to be about man’s hopeless depravity, but instead they are about the spark of humanity that still shines in every man, not matter how depraved his actions. This was the lesson that Dostoevsky drew from his 5 years in Siberia, and it is the main idea that Janacek conveys in his libretto and his music.

The House of the Dead works through speech, not through action. In this, as in his other operas, Janacek took enormous pains to make his characters sing as they would speak. His rhythms mimic speech patterns and his vocal melodies rise and fall accoring to the inflections of spoken Czech. (For this reason the opera is particularly difficult to translate.) The orchestra picks up on these speech rhythms, often echoing them, sometimes anticipating them. When is not reflecting speech, the orchestra tends to play fragments of melodies and ostinatos that provide a kind of underscoring as conversations and narratives start, stop and resume again.