“From the House of the Dead,” a Czech opera based on a Dostoevsky novel about a Siberian work camp, is, as the title suggests, a bit of a downer. The hour-and-a-half long, intermission-less performance forces the audience to feel the characters’ extreme sadness, boredom, and violence in an intense and incredibly moving way.
The opera, composed by Leos Janácek, opens as prisoners, clad in dark, ragged clothing, stagger across the stage in almost complete obscurity. They begin to fight, wrestling one another to the ground. The opera thus establishes its central atmosphere, a kind of intense boredom combined with disturbing violence.
Surrounded by giant concrete walls and blinded by fluorescent prison lights, the characters spend most of the opera recounting tales from the outside. Many of them explain why they are in prison—Filka, performed by tenor Stefan Margita, was imprisoned for vagrancy, and recounts how he killed an officer and was beaten for it.
Two others, Skuratov (Kurt Streit) and Shishkov (Peter Mattei) relate their crimes of passion—the first killed the man his beloved was meant to marry, the second killed his beloved for loving someone else—that led them to prison.
Throughout the opera, the monotony of prison life is broken up by fights, beatings, and moments of strained expression. In the first act, Skuratov attempts to describe his old life in Moscow, and then suddenly breaks out into a crazed dance and collapses. In Act II, the prisoners put on a drag pantomime performance of Don Juan, supposedly to pass the time. Their performance is wrought with violent sexual energy.
The music is repetitive and allegedly follows Czech speech patterns. Though many students likely have no knowledge of the Czech language, they may be able to appreciate this fact—much of the singing sounds more like melodic speech. The percussion includes chains and hammers, mimicking the work that the prisoners are forced to do. The arias are often pained and brutal—beautiful but also difficult to listen to.
The opera’s 90-minutes felt strangely long, but this can be attributed to the intentionally slow movement of the opera. Through the music’s repetition, the set’s drab colors, and the characters’ constant appeals to a life beyond the prison walls, the audience begins to feel a bit imprisoned, too.
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