Leos Janacek's final work was From the House of the Dead, his opera based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel. It wasn't premiered until 1930, two years after his death. Opera companies have had to make do with a version by Janacek's pupils that added a happy ending, but the recent publication of a new edition provides something more closely aligned with what Janacek originally intended. This new score has been responsible for quite a few new productions in the past couple of years, including this one from Munich. Reading reviews of the productions in Wales, London and Paris, it's probably not surprising how different each one is. Opera today often seems to be focussed less on the music, the drama, and even the personality of the singers, and has become primarily a tabula rasa upon which clever (and sometimes genuinely innovative) stage directors overwrite their own aesthetic and political ideas. That's certainly the case with Frank Castorf's intriguing staging involving on-stage videography, complex picture-in-picture sequences, and anachronisms from Trotsky to Adidas. Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Masculin Féminin was famously about "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Castorf's vision of this opera is a similar melding: this time of the Czarist Eagle, the rites and symbols of the Orthodox Church, and a big neon Pepsi sign.
This is more or less standard post-modern pastiche, and it's often to the point, tragic and/or funny. But it can also be occasionally too much on the nose, and when it's not deliberately obscure, it is sometimes only banal. The main problem is that the opera is rather short; it runs only 90 minutes, without an intermission. The secondary problem is that neither Dostoevsky nor Janacek bothered with any overarching story, but rather strung together a series of episodes which happen in the Siberian prison location. A confusing jumble of images might be the by-product of this remix; it might even be by Castorf's design. Having the opera on Blu-ray does allow one to re-watch and gain new insights, pausing along the way to do some Wikipedia sleuthing. I admit that the work seemed more coherent the second time around. But there must have been some head-scratching an hour and a half after the curtain rose at the Staatsoper.
What sells me on Janacek's opera, though, is his music. If one can follow the dramatic sense of a scene, it's absolutely staggering what beautiful, poignant, haunting, terrifying sounds Janacek provides, over and over again. What he has done through the music is to wordlessly re-introduce the most important theme of this, and of all Dostoevsky's novels: redemption.
The Munich production shines in this regard. Simone Young's conducting of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester and Chorus is outstanding; the music is taut and naturally evolving, even as the stage action gets run through Castorf's blender. The singing, and within Castorf's limits, the acting, of the principals is marvellous. Evgeniya Sotnikova is outstanding as Aljeja in her various guises, while standouts in the otherwise all-male cast include Peter Rose, Ales Briscein and Charles Workman. I believe this production will improve each time I watch it; there's no doubt in my mind, though, that this is one of the greatest operas ever written.
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