"From the House of the Dead is Janá?ek's final work and arguably his most powerful. Completed just before his death and first performed posthumously in 1930, the opera is based on Dostoyevsky's semi-autobiographical novel describing life in a Siberian gulag. Janá?ek does not soften that harsh reality at the heart of his tale, but imbues the work with compassion in its honest depiction of humanity's difficult truths. The result is one of his most humane and inspiring creations." More ...