From a house of the dead

The opera in three acts From a house of the dead (Z mrtvého domu in Czech) by Leoš Janáček is staged at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro dell'Opera conducted by Dmitry Matvienko. Based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862), the opera premiered posthumously at the Brno National Theater in 1930.

The work, written between 1927 and 1928, the year of Janáček's death, is a visionary story set in the "house of the dead" - a term by which the Siberian labor camp is called by those detained inside it - in which Dostoevsky draws on memories of his four years of detention in a prison camp. Leoš Janáček managed to create the music and libretto of a unique work in the history of musical theatre: the peculiarity of the story is in fact the development of a story without heroes, without a precise plot that revolves around a conflict and its subsequent resolution. Against the backdrop of the boring and exhausting routine of camp life, Janáček allows individual prisoners and their stories to emerge from the multitude. This is how their personal journeys are narrated, marked by humiliation and abuse. The composer's extraordinary musical language paints a stark picture of the brutality of life in the camp, but also, at times, glimpses of shared hope and solidarity.

Three-year project in collaboration with the Royal Opera House of London

New staging of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in co-production with Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London, Théâtre de La Monnaie, Brussels, Opéra national de Lyon.

Photo: Pascal Charbonneau (Aljeja), Willard White (Alexandr Petrovic Gorjancikov), credit ROH, ph Clive Barda