Prisoners singing their souls raw — Dostoevsky's hell remixed by a 70-year-old musical rebel.
Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.
Direction
Kořínek stages prison as purgatorial waiting room.
Score
Janáček's final opera — fragmented, speech-driven, revolutionary.
Production
Glagolitic Mass paired as spiritual counterweight.
Director
Jakub Kořínek
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Janáček completed the opera score mere months before his death in 1928; his pupils had to decipher his notation for the premiere.
The Glagolitic Mass uses the ancient Slavic liturgical language — Janáček's nationalist counterpunch to Germanic musical dominance, written in the same burst of late creative fury.
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