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Notes on the Program
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair
From the House of the Dead Overture
Leoš Janáček
he House of the Dead (Z Mrtvého Dom) was
the last of Leoš Janáček’s nine operas. The
serial novel From the House of the Dead, by
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81), was an odd
choice on which to base an opera. Dostoyevsky
wrote it from 1860 to 1862 as an ostensibly fictional (but really autobiographical) account of
the four years he served under a sentence of
hard labor at the Siberian prison at Omsk. He
had been arrested in 1849 as a political dissident because of his membership in a Socialist
group, and he was actually condemned to
death (along with 20 cohorts) and led to his execution before the sentence was converted at
the last minute to mere imprisonment.
Setting Dostoyevsky’s novel led to a nontraditional opera — a series of snapshots of
prison life in which plotlines emerge, recede,
and disappear, a narrative in which, as Dostoyevsky observed, “convicts lived … not as if
this were their home, but as some wayside inn,
en route somewhere.” The resulting opera has
no major characters, really, instead drawing
on a succession of singers in small parts. It’s
an all-male world, with the only female character being a prostitute (although one prisoner is so young that he is cast as a “pants
role,” a boy portrayed by a woman singer).
Janáček created the libretto himself, drawing
selectively but directly from Dostoyevsky’s
text. The composer owned copies of the novel
in both Russian and Czech, but he worked
predominantly from the original, inscribing
the words in his score in a mix of Russian and
his own Czech translation. He had essentially
signed off on the opera’s first two acts by the
time he died, and the third act, which remained on his desk, lacked only a few details,
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which editors finalized prior to the opera’s
first production, in 1930.
Janáček initially envisioned the music of
the overture for a very different medium — a
violin concerto, which he began sketching in
May 1926. It seems to have been fueled by
some underlying program, since Janáček attached various subtitles to it as he sketched:
“The Pilgrimage of a Soul,” “Soul,” and “Little
Soul.” By the following February he had completed two drafts of the Violin Concerto, and
then he suddenly abandoned it, recycling
much of its material into the overture for the
new opera he was beginning. (In 1988 it was
published as a Violin Concerto through the efforts of two Czech editors, but there is every indication that Janáček did not sanction the
piece in the form he originally wrote it.) What
IN SHORT
Born: July 3, 1854, in Hukvaldy, Moravia
(today the Czech Republic)
Died: August 12, 1928, in Moravská Ostrava,
Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic)
Work composed: sketched as a violin concerto from May 1926 to February 1927; transformed into orchestral overture as Janáček
composed the opera From the House of the
Dead, from February 1927 until his death
World premiere: the opera From the House
of the Dead, premiered April 12, 1930, at the
National Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia
New York Philharmonic premiere and most
recent performances: March 23–29, 1983, in
a concert version of the complete opera,
Rafael Kubelík, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
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is most curious is that the score for the aborted
Violin Concerto includes rattling chains as an
addition to the percussion section. The chains
make perfect sense in the context of the opera,
and, indeed, they become an ongoing part of
the sound world of From the House of the Dead.
When he transformed this music for its new
role, Janáček maintained strikingly virtuosic
passages for the solo violin, and he even expanded the concerto idea by adding a supporting a line for second violin. The Janáček
scholar Erik Chisholm tried gamely to make
sense of it:
The overture is cast as a sort of rondo,
with the recurring theme being the highpitched, potentially grating music played
by the violins at the outset and then repeated by the full orchestra. Between iterations of the rondo theme (which
sometimes returns in varied form) come
fleeting sections of contrasting emotional
quality: a dance-like passage evoking
waltz and polka, a haunting episode of
dreamlike surrealism, a section of nervous
tenseness, even moments of triumphant
transcendence.
Basically, a concerto is a conflict between
soloist and orchestra — an individual instrument in opposition to a mass of instruments: and in the few places where
the solo violin asserts itself … it is soon
swept under by the overpowering mass of
orchestral tone in much the same way as
the individualism of a convict is swamped
by the dead-pan level of the mass of convicts and by the voice of authority.
Instrumentation: four flutes (two doubling piccolo), two oboes and English
horn, three clarinets (one doubling bass
clarinet), three bassoons (one doubling
contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets and bass trumpet (doubling tenor
tuba), three trombones, tuba, timpani,
chains, xylophone, triangle, chimes, harp,
celeste, and strings.
Sources and Inspirations
Leoš Janáček was an enthusiastic Russophile. Although he visited Russia only once (a trip to St.
Petersburg in 1902), he gave his two children Russian names — Olga and Vladimir — and was
widely read in Russian literature. When he was 22 he wrote a melodrama for speaker and orchestra, titled Death, to a text by Lermontov; his Pohádka
(Fairy Tale) for Cello and Piano (1910) was inspired by
Zhukovsky’s “The Tale of Czar Berendey”; and his orchestral
rhapsody Taras Bulba (1905–18) mirrored a story by Gogol.
The works of Tolstoy affected Janáček deeply: in 1921 he
considered writing an opera on Anna Karenina and two years
later he actually did compose his String Quartet No. 1, inspired
by the novella The Kreutzer Sonata. “You see, Dostoyevsky —
there’s literature!” Janáček exclaimed in an interview that appeared in the magazine Literárni svét on March 8, 1928, while
he was working on From the House of the Dead:
In every man a divine spark — they are terribly good people. And then fate strikes — I would say a stab of destiny —
only one, and they have to suffer. They will rue it and yet
they are people with hearts of pure gold.
Janáček, ca. 1926
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