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.
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