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From the House of the Dead — Janáček's last opera, given its premiere in 1930, two years after his death — is a searing, devastating, unrelenting piece. It's about life in a Tsarist-era Russian prison camp, and that's where it takes us, making us look at the prisoners and the mostly painful lives they lead and never letting us turn our faces away.

This sounds, perhaps, as if it might make for an unpleasant experience. But if the portrait painted in From the House of the Dead is unflinching, it's also unfailingly compassionate. Janáček couldn't write an opera without caring deeply for the people portrayed in it. In fact, he seems to be present himself in all his operas, to inhabit them, almost as if he were not just their creator but somehow a participant, as strong a force onstage as any of his characters. Listen to his operas one by one, and you'll hear how this is true. In Káťa Kabanová, his music tells you — with a surge of almost naïve romanticism — that he's fallen in love with his doomed and helpless heroine. In Jenůfa, the warmth and sweep of his music tells us that he understands and forgives everyone onstage, including the frantic lover who has taken a knife and slashed Jenůfa's face — and even the desperate old woman who does something almost unspeakably horrible: she drowns a baby.

In From the House of the Dead, some of the prisoners have done things almost as bad. But Janáček believes in them as people. Here's one small example. One of the worst prisoners, from any moral point of view, lies dying in the final act. All we hear from him are heartbreaking moans, which aren't even the focus of our attention. Other things are going on, and we hear the moans, once in a while, in the background.

When the prisoner dies, he suddenly pops into focus, as — for a moment or two — the center of everyone's attention. And then the focus ebbs, and most of the prisoners seem to ignore the dead man. But still he gets a short but heartfelt epitaph. "He was born of a mother," one of the prisoners says. Born of a mother, as all of us are. "In every soul a spark of God," Janáček wrote on the opera's title page, and that's both the theme of the work and the profound faith that brings every moment of the score alive.

The origin of the opera is, in one way, simple enough. Janáček, writing his own libretto, adapted the piece from Dostoyevsky's memoir of life in a Tsarist prison camp, also called From the House of the Dead. "Memoir" isn't quite the right word, because Dostoyevsky framed his work as the reminiscences of someone else, an imaginary former prisoner named Alexandr Petrovich Goryanchikov. But the book is really his own story, an account of his own prison-camp experience.

It's an important work, historically, because it's the first literary depiction of Russian prison camps (and thus gave rise to a genre that exploded more than a century later in books about the Soviet Gulag). But it's also surprisingly detailed. There's the outline of a narrative arc, since the book begins with Goryanchikov's arrival at the prison camp and ends with his release. But what happens in between is mainly a collection of anecdotes, and sometimes just a catalogue of details, largely arranged in the driest way possible, by subject. There are chapters, for instance, about the prison hospital, about theatrical shows the prisoners put on and about animals in the prison — a horse, a goat, dogs, geese and a bad-tempered eagle with an injured wing, which the prisoners throw to freedom from the prison ramparts. It runs away, because it's too hurt to fly.

There also are vivid, even painful moments in the book, about flogging and other kinds of mistreatment, along with unflinching stories of the crimes that brought the prisoners to the camp. But much of the book seems almost deliberately dispassionate, and this is where Janáček's adaptation isn't simple at all. To read the book, if you already know the opera, is an extraordinary chance to see the world through someone else's eyes, because Janáček changed what he read. The book, to him, was more than a collection of facts. It was a celebration of humanity: "In every soul a spark of God!"

So the composer created a far more poignant narrative arc, or rather a set of narrative arcs, not planning his libretto in advance but letting it emerge on its own as he sat at his piano, composing, with the book open before him.

One thought he seized on was freedom, and how powerfully the prisoners long for it. At the start of the opera, Alexandr Petrovich Goryanchikov comes to the prison, and at the end, he's released. And yes, that's straight from Dostoyevsky. But in the opera, overlapping Goryanchikov's arrival and release, is the story of the eagle, from the chapter on prison animals, transformed into something Dostoyevsky never wrote. When Goryanchikov comes to the prison, the eagle is sick. When he leaves, the prisoners set it free, and it soars into the sky, healthy and healed. It flies off in glory. "Tsar of the forests!" the prisoners call it, singing those words to music that yearns and soars, even though, in the book, "Tsar of the forests" isn't much more than a throwaway line, and perhaps an ironic one — something just one prisoner says, while the others pay no attention.

That strengthens the outline of the opera, but Janáček still had to fill in the arc. And his job wasn't easy. Goryanchikov turns out to be only one character among many, just as he does in the book. He's not the center of the story; nobody is. Instead, we're confronted by many prisoners, meeting them two ways, sometimes as individuals and sometimes as a united group (which they never are in the book), when in a few scattered but powerful moments they sing as a chorus.

The most striking solo moments are narratives, one in each act — separate arcs within the opera's larger arc — in which one of the prisoners tells his story. Of course these narratives come from the book, but they loom far larger in the opera, and each new one dominates more than the last. In Act I, a prisoner named Luka Kuzmich tells how he stabbed an officer at another prison. In Act II, someone named Skuratov tells a longer, more heartrending, powerful tale, about a woman he loved who married someone else, and how he killed her husband. (He killed the woman, too, though he can't bear to tell us at the time, so we learn it only later.)

Then, as if that weren't enough, in Act III a prisoner named Shishkov, whom we've barely seen to that point, tells a ghastly tale. It's about Akulina, a woman Shishkov married, and a man called Filka Morozov, who said he'd taken Akulina's chastity but was lying. It's about Shishkov defending Akulina, when he learned that the charge was a lie, Filka sowing doubts, Akulina saying that Filka was the man she really loved — and Shishkov cutting her throat. Janáček's music winds around these horrors, gets inside them, lights them from within. We follow each horror as if we were watching the events unfold onstage.

And in the background, the dying prisoner mentioned earlier is moaning. We know him as Luka Kuzmich, who told a simpler story in Act I. He dies. And that — with something not even remotely found in Dostoyevsky — becomes the final jolt in Shishkov's shocking narrative: Shishkov now sees that Luka was Filka Morozov.

This makes no sense, of course. Here the two men were, locked in the camp together for years. How could Shishkov not recognize the man who ruined his life? Janáček, in inventing this climax, was terribly naïve and terribly melodramatic. But still his invention hits with dismaying force. That must be because of Janáček's commitment — because we've learned to trust him, because by this point in the piece we'll follow him anywhere. If he says Luka is really Filka Morozov, then while his music grips us we believe him. Later we might realize, if we analyze what happened, that the revelation ties the stories in Acts I and III together (since Luka/Filka tells the first one and is the center of the second), which helps to weld the opera into a single narrative.

What about the music? I doubt anyone would call it tuneful. Shards of folk-like melodies crop up, but they're embedded in a pulsing twentieth-century score that's tonal, certainly, but largely not melodic. It's built mostly from short motifs — curt, forceful musical thoughts, sometimes jagged, sometimes brutal, sometimes melting, sometimes painful, and sometimes harsh and icy, like the Russian winters that chill the prison camp.

These motifs show up largely in the orchestra. The vocal lines, by contrast, seem less relentless. They have the shape and flow of speech, just as the vocal music does in all Janáček's operas. Janáček, as he went about his life, would listen to the way people talked — in the street, in cafés, even in the opera house — and he'd write down the shape and flow of what he heard them saying, using musical notation.

When he wrote his operas, he'd reverse the process, finding music that made his characters sound as if they were speaking. The result is far more than traditional operatic recitative. It's far more varied, far more forceful and, at yearning moments, more achingly melodic, because Janáček forged not just the shape and flow of speech but the emotions caught inside it. His characters reveal their souls, singing with unerring inner truth.

This is a subtle kind of vocal writing. Not everyone, however, thinks the orchestral score is subtle. Pierre Boulez — who conducted European performances of the Patrice Chéreau production of From the House of the Dead that's coming to the Met — has said that Janáček's orchestral writing strikes him as "primitive." He goes on to say that Janáček never develops any musical ideas but instead "repeats and repeats, and then changes the repeating figure, the ostinato.… There are many cases where you cannot find the logic in how the rhythmic notation changes from one ostinato to the next." And even in his own time, Janáček was criticized for composing in what seemed to be a simple-minded way.

But is the repetition really arbitrary? I wonder. In From the House of the Dead, the prisoners keep getting into arguments. Not three minutes into the first scene, two camp inmates — called only "Short Prisoner" and "Tall Prisoner" — shout crazy insults at each other about what kind of bird each one supposedly is. "What kind?" "That kind!" This feels like a ritual, something they've been through before and will go through again. So if this is the life they lead — and every fight the prisoners have feels like a ritual — why not set it to insistently repeating music?

As for the way the ostinatos change, certainly it's true that Janáček doesn't organize the music in his operas with the logic of, let's say, the Mahler symphonies that Boulez conducts. The music doesn't move in ways that can be explained purely in musical terms. But opera isn't only music, and if Janáček's opera scores don't follow any known logic of musical form, they make a different kind of sense: they have the logic of the theater.

Again, look at the opera's very first scene. It's full of musical thoughts that start, stop, shift and change. First there's something that hits like a body blow, sounding cold (with shivering high trills) but also strongly compassionate. This sets the prison scene, with the Russian winter in the background. But the stage is full of prisoners, each involved in something different, and the music seems to rest for just a moment on many of them as individuals. There's a wistful little oboe tune, then a military snare drum (meant, perhaps, to evoke the prison guards). Then we hear something folk-like in the violins, then something we might swear was the cruel, harsh rattle of chains and in fact does turn out to be chains, used in the orchestra as a percussion instrument, surely to depict the iron fetters that the prisoners are forced to wear on their legs.

All these changes in the music reflect what we see onstage. They're like the camera's shifting eye in a film. When the tall and short prisoners fight, the music — as it insistently repeats — seems to poke and nag. When the fight is over, there's a brutal stroke on the timpani, and the opening music returns, though it doesn't sound like a return to where we've been but rather like a kind of marker, signaling the start of something new. And in fact that is what we have, onstage, when Goryanchikov is brought to the camp under guard.

So the music — even if it sometimes repeats itself — is constantly adapting to new dramatic moments. Here we find what may be Janáček's greatest musical achievement. In each of his operas — Jenůfa, Osud, The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Case — he refined his artistic vision, until, in From the House of the Dead, every new moment in the music seems uniquely inspired, the unshakable embodiment of whatever dramatic episode it brings to life.

When Janáček died, he left From the House of the Dead not quite in final form. And his genius wasn't fully understood. Even some of his closest colleagues couldn't believe how stark the opera's orchestration was, how (to give just one example) it might sometimes leave the high violins clashing nakedly with darker, lower instruments, with nothing harmonious added to fill the empty space between. So Janáček's score was revised, to make it sound more conventional.

But we know better now, and we perform the opera almost exactly as Janáček left it, with only a few details filled in, where even a sympathetic ear can hear that something is very likely missing. What we're left with is a piece whose power lies in part in what seems to be its naïveté. Janáček is wholly honest. He didn't stop to wonder if someone else might find him crude, or to adapt his music to make it more acceptable. From that, From the House of the Dead gets its power. It's a vision that carries us away with it and leaves us helpless to reject anything that Janáček believed.

GREG SANDOW is an opera composer and consultant who's also well known for his writings on the future of classical music.

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