From the House of the Dead was the last opera of Czech composer Leos Janácek. Even for a composer with a track record of making great operas out of unusual material, it was an especially odd choice for an opera. Based on Dostoyevsky's novel of the same title, From the House of the Dead is almost unrelievedly grim, almost without character development, almost without dramatic action in any conventional sense, and for the first time in any opera since Monteverdi, almost completely without a female character. And yet it succeeds brilliantly both as a story and as music, capping Janácek's career with one of his masterpieces.

Set in a Siberian prison camp in the middle years of the nineteenth century, From the House of the Dead is in three acts. But while each act is concluded by a wonderful coup de théâtre, the essential structure of the opera comprises a series of monologues by the various characters describing their crimes and punishments. Equally important, however, is the role of the chorus. Like Beethoven's Fidelio—another prison opera—the chorus is as much a character in the drama as any of the soloists. Janácek's music for From the House of the Dead is an unusually extreme example of his late style: hard, harsh, aggressively modernist in its harmonies, brutal and frenetic in its rhythms, but essentially lyrical in its themes and melodies. Although these themes and melodies are terse and often elusive, they are always absolutely pertinent for the expressive needs of the character and always stunningly lyrical in their effect. Janácek's scoring is of chamber-like transparency, with a prominent part for the percussion section that includes chains, appropriately enough for a prison opera. Although left not quite complete at his unexpected death in 1928, the score of From the House of the Dead is perfectly performable in the state Janácek left it.

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