Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech —Her Stepdaughter — or the elegant misdirection of The Beginning of a Romance. It encourages the suspicion that when Janacek christened his final opera, deliberately truncating the title of Dostoyevsky’s Siberian prison camp-inspired novel Notes From the House of the Dead, there was good reason.
It’s a title that opens out a description into an implied question: From the House of the Dead to, where or what exactly? Where can you go, who can you cry out to, once you have crossed over into the underworld and witnessed its horrors?
Where indeed. In this new production by Krzysztof Warlikowksi — the first ever, unaccountably, in the Royal Opera House’s history — the answer remains frustratingly unclear. There’s evidence of conflict and confusion throughout; the lavish scope and scale of Malgorzata Szczesniak’s contemporary designs contradicts the grotty, insistent smallness and ugliness of the human detail within. The expansive, poetic symbol of the wounded eagle, tormented at first, then healed and freed by the prisoners, is here rendered quite literally earth-bound, transformed into a man viciously attacked by his fellow inmates. But a final scene, in which violent abuser Nikita presides, Christ-like, over the Eagle’s first tottering steps from his wheelchair, sees realism curdle into sentimentality, dramatic prose into second-rate visual poetry. Resurrection or eternal damnation — Warlikowski cannot seem to decide.
Janacek’s interest is with the individuals trapped within the prison system, the stories that make the man — not for nothing does this almost plotless opera spend so much of its time in reminiscence, as each inmate narrates the events leading up to his incarceration.
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