Ten years after the end of the first world war, the 74-year-old Czech composer Leoš Janáček completed his final opera, From the House of Dead. The 1920s was a period of economic prosperity and Gatsbyesque indulgence, but those less inclined to denial saw the wasteland left in the wake of such senseless global conflict. Indeed, TS Eliot’s 1922 poem of that name reflected many people’s numb confusion.
Janáček based his own fragmentary mix of “memory and desire” on the 19th-century Siberian prison memoirs of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The stage is full of some of the most aggressive and unpleasant people you could imagine. Yet with music of intense beauty, vulnerability, strength, pathos, and humour, the composer encourages us to look for life in even the blackest of holes. From the House of the Dead is a perfect illustration of opera’s ability to articulate the disconcerting, and a deeply moving example of its power to shine light into a darkness that some might prefer to ignore. A new production by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden – its first ever staging of the work – opens this week.
There are probably a few reasons why it has taken 90 years for the Royal Opera to perform what many consider to be the greatest work by such a theatrically approachable and psychologically relevant composer as Janáček. But the Covent Garden audience is no longer made up of people who go to the opera to seek an escape from reality. Opera can be a mirror for our time, one that invites us to look at ourselves as individuals and as the communities we are part of, inspiring us to find private or public solutions to the challenges we face.
In a climate of moral absolutism and the intolerance that that engenders, From the House of the Dead is a much needed celebration of the redemptive power of empathy. The worst of our society are worth more than the worst things they have ever done, and though humankind’s capacity for futile violence might seem as strong as ever, Janáček does not believe we should give up on those we do not understand. Through the transcendental qualities of his music, he shows us that everyone is human. Even murderers, as one of the characters says, “had a mother”. It is not so much a question of forgiveness, but rather one of understanding. How we judge criminals is a sign of how we judge ourselves. The state of a prison is more an indication of the values of those on the outside than it is of those incarcerated within.
Janáček is the ideal composer to counteract those who wonder whether opera can be a credible dramatic experience if realistic expression feels compromised by the fact that everyone is singing. He believed that “the truest expression of the soul lies in the melodic motifs of speech”. A lifelong obsession with the rhythmic and melodic patterns of what we say (even to the extent of annotating musically his dying daughter’s final words) led him to take a great deal of time and trouble prescribing exactly how the texts of his operas should be sung. The result is a sincere and primordial form of communication, one in which the words and notes are so connected that it is impossible to conceive of one without the other – or even which came first. His compositional style is a persuasive argument in support of the view that language and music evolved as two sides of the same coin. In essence, they are one and the same thing.
Such detailed control of the text also means that a speed that is right for the words is right for the music too. Were From the House of Dead to be performed as a play without any music at all, it would probably last exactly the same length of time. Perhaps uniquely in opera, not a single sung word has a pause written above it – an acknowledgment that when we speak, our pauses most often occur not on the words but in the spaces we choose to put between them. It is with our silences that we reveal more.
For Janáček, the sound of silence was an audible thing, and he uses the orchestra to weave a constant thread through the disparate montage of Dostoevsky’s prison life. We hear the prisoners’ private longing, their inner anger, regret, uncertainty and conviction.
And we hear the femininity of the many women, whom an almost exclusively male cast spend most of the opera remembering. In a more literal sense, we hear the noises of everyday life too. Musicians are required to play prison chains, church bells, rattles, spades, axes, and even a saw. “I’ve run out of wood!” is not a sentence you usually hear in rehearsals.
On the title page of this extraordinary work’s barely legible manuscript, Janáček added: “In every creature, a spark of God.” It is a statement of profound affirmation from within the depths of despair – a complexity that the many-layered operatic form is well equipped to express. From the House of the Dead is able to be optimistic and triumphant because it offers what Janáček called a “vibrating string”, connecting us all through consideration and compassion. As F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, around the same time as this opera, “reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope”. Hope is something we have an individual responsibility to act upon.
- Mark Wigglesworth conducts From the House of the Dead at the Royal Opera House, London, until 24 March. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
