Patrice Chereau’s Metropolitan Opera Production of Janacek’s Haunting ‘From the House of the Dead’ from Dostoyevsky

 by Sam Juliano

     From the House of the Dead, based on a novel by Dostoyevsky, may well be famed Czechoslovakian composer Leos Janacek’s most extraordinary opera.  The rather extreme musical style of the last years of Janacek’s life is complemented here by a dramaturgy in opera that was actually years ahead of its time.  This is a stark work with vocal writing that exhibits powerful expressive force.  It is the final work from Janacek, and like the three that preceded it- Kata Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropoulos Case it speaks with a deeply humanitarian voice.  The composer aimed here to portray the bleakest suffering, unknowingly creating resonances with historical events and places he would never live to see – notably, the gulags of Soviet Russia and the concentration camps of the Nazi regime.  The raw power of the situation itself is paralleled brilliantly in the composer’s style.  Janacek’s depiction of the Russian penitentiary is so belligerant, so forceful in its realism that it takes on a kind of white-hot fervor.  In fact Janecek once wrote: “You know the terror, the inner feelings of a human being who will never cease to breathe: complete despair which wants nothing and expects nothing.  This will be developed in my Dostoyevsky opera.” 

     Celebrated film director Patrice Chereau, who is equally famed for his Bayreuth Wagner Ring Cycle, acknowledges the results of this development when he asserts that “there are two things that I sometimes hear about From the House of the Dead: that there is no plot, and that there is no love or hope in the story. The title of the opera comes from the novel by Dostoyevsky, who believed these kinds of prisons are made for killing people.  In a  beautiful passage, he says that every youth, every hope, every future is destroyed in these camps.  But then he goes on to tell tell incredibly beautiful stories about a group of fascinating people who are still living and hoping, trying to survive, through tears or anger, in the inferno of the prison.  That’s the paradox: the inmates know that there is no hope of ever leaving the prison, but  they nevertheless strive to survive.  They have enormous energy for surviving, for creating a community, and the prison becomes its own society.  Janacek’s music, with its rude, some times violent sound, with its use of ostinato, with its strange and incredibly strong forms, tells us the story of a community that is alive and energetic.”

     With From the House of the Dead Janacek has made a kind of collage, assembling elements and placing them one aside the other, like a collection of postage stamps.  Over the course of the performance, three people emerge from the huge ensemble and explain how they came to commit murder.  Three people – Luka, Skuratov, and Shishkov tell their stories, and from these smaller pieces emerges a single arc and story: the story of this particular humanity, with its stronger characters and weaker ones.  Chereau effectively binds everything together to forge a clear destiny for all the characters and to make the story larger than its individual pieces.  Hence, love, or the lack of love is at play every day in this prison.  Skuratov kills for love and Shishkov kills for lack of it.  And at the center of the piece, there are two plays – within-the-play, which the prisoners have probably spent a year preparing, and both of them are about love, (which is basically everywhere in this opera, because that’s what the prisoners miss most.)  The life of this group of people is both the plot of From the House of the Dead and their destiny.  Janacek, like Dostoyevsky before him do not pass judgement on the murderers, instead urging tolerance and respect.

     While the original story of From the House of the Dead unfolds in a prison settlement in Siberia in the 19th century, the action of the Chereau staging is set in an unspecified time and place, much in the tradition of Brecht.  The diverse characters represent a rough cross-section of society, including, among others a nobleman, a priest, a drunk, and a commendant and guards who are also, in a sense, victims of their system.  Set designer Richard Perduzzi has constructed high concrete walls (seen in picture above) that periodically slide open and closed, and the claustrophobic enclave contains the crowded cast.  The rather slovenly, indescript costumes and dingy lighting (not to mention some simulated onstage sex) were also characteristics of another Met production I saw earlier this year – Luc Bondy’s controversial Tosca.  Perduzzi designed that one too.  But where the avante garde approach clashed with the lavish ornate architecture and aesthetic demand of the Italian opera, the approach here is compellingly effective, and it provides a perfect match for the brutally beautiful score that is noted by an economy of expression that deftly encapsulates thoughts and emotions.  It’s music that’s sometimes dissonant, sometimes lyrical, and always inventive.  It blends romanticism and modernity, and a vast orchestra is employed.  Violin solos are particularly ravishing, while the vocal lines are declamatory and closely follow the speech pattern of the Czech language.   And it was quite joyously apparent that Janacek’s love for folk music shines through in the dance tunes that appear in a play-within-the-opera, although these melodies are far beyond exercises in the picturesque; here they are tainted by memories, and the sound is simultaneously beautiful and ominous.

      Delivering the opera’s longest soliloquy – almost 20 minutes to some urgent music- Peter Mattei gives a powerful and moving peformance as Shishkov, who commits a “crime of passion.”  Stefan Margita in his Met debut, is a tenor who plays Filka (Luka) and he sings a moving monologue about being sent to jail and then murdering a strong-arming officer.  Eric Stoklossa, who also makes his first appearance at the opera house, is a winning Alyeya, who is befriended by the comamnding Gorianchikov, who is played by the superb baritone Willard White.

     The opera’s biggest pyro-technic moment (and some patrons who spend over $250 for a seat in the front orchestra and first balcony need something to visually excite them) was when a massive load of what appeared to paper and garbage fell onto the stage from above, which was an excellent transitional device, which segued into a stage of dust and smoke.

     It’s stagings like this from luminaries like Chereau, and much obscured and underestimated scores, like this one-act work (which is surely one of Janecek’s best,) that allow for the perfect chemisty to create that rarity on the Metropolitan opera house stage.  From the House of the Dead is a miracle.

Note:  I saw ‘From the House of the Dead’ on Wednesday night (Dec. 2nd) all by my lonesome at the Met.  The opera ran only 1 hour and 35 minutes (an unusually short opera) with no intermission.  I spent some time before on this rainy but mild evening at a local sandwich shop on Broadway enjoying some tomato rice soup and some blueberries and fruit juice.