From the House of the Dead () is an opera in three acts by Leoš Janáček. The libretto was translated and adapted by the composer from the 1862 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was the composer's last opera, premiered on 12 April 1930 at the National Theatre Brno, two years after his death. The United States premiere of the work took place at Lincoln Center in 1989 when the New York City Opera mounted a production led by conductor Christopher Keene with a cast starring Harlan Foss as Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov, John Absalom as Filka Morozov, Jon Garrison as Skuratov, and John Lankston as Šapkin. Composition history Janáček worked on this opera from February 1927 to 8 June 1928, knowing that it would be his last, and for it he broke away from the habit he had developed of creating characters modeled on his love interest Kamila Stösslová, although the themes of loneliness and isolation can clearly be seen as a response to her indifference to his feelings. There is only one female character, and the setting, a Siberian prison, presents a large ensemble cast instead of one or several prominent leads. There is no narrative to the work as a whole, but individual characters narrate episodes in their lives, and there is a play-within-a-play in act 2. From the House of the Dead was virtually finished when Janáček died. Two of his students, believing the orchestration was incomplete, "filled out" large portions of the score and adapted the ending to be more optimistic in tone. In addition to the work of Břetislav Bakala and Osvald Chlubna, made changes to the text and sequence of events in the opera. Decades later, a version closer to the composer's intentions superseded that version, and it is the one most often heard today. Some productions, however, still use the earlier version's ending to lessen the bleakness of the story. The opera requires a vast orchestra, including chains as a percussion instrument to evoke the sound of the prisoners. The words of prisoners' songs from the Dostoevsky novel are used in full or in part by Janáček. An arrangement in the form of a suite of the opera by conductor František Jílek has been performed by the Brno Philharmonic. One critic has suggested that by pursuing extreme high and low sonorities in this opera, Janáček was cutting out its heart, the orchestral mid range,