Šiškov

Šiškov says almost nothing for two acts. Then, in the night ward of the Siberian camp, he begins to talk, and the opera stops to listen. Dostoyevsky gave Janáček the story; Janáček gave it to a baritone and refused him every comfort — no aria, no shape, only a man remembering out loud while Čerevin interrupts him with the wrong questions.

The tale is Akulka's. Filka Morozov boasted he had dishonoured her, the village believed him, and Šiškov married a girl nobody else would take — then found her untouched, and found she still loved Filka. He killed her in a wood at dawn. He tells it the way people actually tell such things: sideways, out of order, tender about the details that do not matter. As he finishes, Luka dies in the next bed, and Šiškov sees the face — Filka. The confession has been addressed, all along, to a man who could no longer hear it.

The demand is endurance of a strange kind. Twenty minutes of Janáček's speech-melody, every phrase cut to the fall of spoken Czech, sung quietly and almost without vibrato while the orchestra keeps its distance. I do not perform the murder. I let the man arrive at it, and let the audience notice, a beat before he does, that there was never anyone to forgive him.