Organization

Conductor

Robert Kružík

Chorus master

Pavel Koňárek

Stage director

Jiří Heřman

Set designer

Tomáš Rusín

Costume designer

Zuzana Štefunková-Rusínová

Lighting designer

Dramaturge

Patricie Částková

Assistant Director

Otakar Blaha

Singer

Tenor

Gianluca Zampieri

Luka Kumic

Peter Berger

Skuratov

Baritone

Pavol Kubán

Shishkov

Bass

Tadeáš Hoza

Brahmin

Eduard Martynyuk

Shapkin

Soprano

Jarmila Balážová

Aljeja

Roman Hoza

Goryanchikov

David Nykl

The drunken prisoner

Kornél Mikecz

The cook

The Commandant

Petr Levíček

The old Prisoner

Zbigniew Malak

The Young Prisoner

Lukáš Bařák

Small Convict

Josef Škarka

Priest

Kateřina Kněžíková

soprano

Mezzo-soprano

alto

Jana Hrochová

tenor

Jan Šťáva

baritono

Jakub Hrůša

Martin Buchta

Choreographer

Jan Kodet

Placmajor

Prisoner 1

blacksmith

Chekunov

Vít Nosek

Prisoner with an eagle

Prisoner 2

The prisoner

Cherevin

Prostitute

ND Brno

Czech

Z mrtvého domu -  (From the House of the Dead)

Brno

Czech Republic

Janáčkovo divadlo

Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’

In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts. The cast is exclusively male and made up of a collective, rather than of interacting soloists; a chorus opera from which individual speakers step out to tell their tales. The longest monologue of all, Šiškov’s, told in the quietness of the prison hospital at night, is emblematic of the whole opera: a harrowing tale constructed around a transcendentally gentle theme, just as Janáček’s own compassion threads through and transforms his grimmest and yet most uplifting opera. Despite an oppressive finale, Janáček wrote at the beginning of the score, ‘In every creature a spark of God!’ And this is this spark that inspired the National Theatre in the composer’s home city of Brno, to connect Janáček’s last opera with an equally distinctive work, his Glagolitic Mass. Janáček said of his Mass : ‘I wanted to capture here faith in the security of the nation not on a religious basis, but on a moral, strong one, which takes God as a witness.’ This live stream from the heart of Janáček country - offering a staged version of the Glagolitic Mass as a continuation of From the House of the Dead in a new critical edition by Prof. John Tyrrell - should bear new testimony to the power of faith in man and to the genius of their local composer.

Photos