Peter Berger

Human soul, pure human soul! The water nymph Rusalka longs for life above the water, for love and a human soul. The witch knows the way, but the price is high – Rusalka loses her ability to speak, but what good is speech when for her beloved prince she is just a wave on the water… The world of men, however, turns out to be cruel and full of betrayal, over which even her pure love cannot prevail. This new version of Rusalka is based on Lars-Åke Thessman’s original set design for Rusalka at the Gothenburg Opera 2012.

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.