Leoš Janáček, From the House of the Dead (1930)

I've never quite come to terms with Janáček: I liked Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen pretty well, but mostly, I feel in spite of the music, which somehow never really grabbed me. The Makropulos Affair, based on a play by Karel Čapek (the guy who coined the word "robot") is arguably a science fiction opera, which is kind of interesting, but somehow I didn't even find it interesting enough to write about here. My fault, I expect.

So I probably wouldn't have watched this anytime soon--I would've had to buy a DVD--but then it turned up on Medici, so I decided, why not? See it here and save some potential cash.

It's based on Dostoevsky's novel, which I ought to read.  It was Janáček's last opera; apparently he didn't quite finish it before he died, but close enough.  It certainly doesn't feel incomplete.  It concerns a noble, Gorjančikov, who's been sent to a Siberian work camp for unclear reasons (in the novel he murdered his wife, but that is not explained here). There are a bunch of other inmates, and a lot of them tell their stories about why they're in the camp. In the end, Gorjančikov is released. Hurray!

I'm afraid I wasn't watching this with quite the right mindset: I kept waiting for there to be an actual plot, with an actual main character or characters, and when there never was, I was left a little disoriented. I really should have just been concentrating on the individual characters and their lives. It is an interesting set-up for an opera, however, and for whatever reason--it's always hard to know whether it's you or the thing itself--I liked the music a lot; more than previous Janáčeks I've seen.

The production is...quite something. I would describe it as an expressionistic vision of a post-apocalyptic Mardi Gras in an Eastern Bloc slum. It is visually striking and fun to watch, but I sort of had my reservations: the characters are meant to be sympathetic or, at the very least, human; the whole point of the thing is Gorjančikov learning to embrace their humanity. Which is laudable! But the tendency here to portray a lot of them as refugees from Beyond Thunderdome seems to cut against that in ways that I don't think always work. I dunno. This might be a good example of an opera that I should see in a different production.

In spite of everything, I still enjoyed it, however. I really need to see Káťa Kabanová, the only frequently-performed Janáček opera of which I am still ignorant.