Nor should they have to. Though the piece is best experienced in the opera house (where it plays through Dec. 5, and won't have a movie-theater simulcast), a Deutsche Grammophon DVD features the same production with different singers, orchestra, and conductor.

Premiered posthumously in 1930 and based on the Dostoyevsky novel of the same name, House of the Dead has long had a mystique of being distinguished but uncompromising. It's a hard-hitting prison drama with minimal plot and, obviously, no operatic love duets - and that militates against any wide popularity. This production, however, attracts a remarkable convergence of talent that's willing to do whatever is necessary for the opera's greater good.

No matter that Willard White stars in Simon Rattle's Ring cycle at Aix-en-Provence; at the Met, he plays a smallish but important ensemble role as the imprisoned nobleman Gorianchikov. French director Chéreau (whose opera productions are rare and always provocative) worked intensively with the New York cast to achieve extra realism: Rehearsal rooms had TV monitors so singers would learn not to look directly at the conductor for cues. The prompter's box was abolished.

In his Met debut, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen rehearsed the orchestra in Janacek's knotty music for a good three weeks before opening - using a score given to him by Pierre Boulez, who made his own edition of the unfinished opera and who won't be needing it. Boulez's outing with House of the Dead two years ago (preserved on the DG DVD) was his swan song to opera.

The result is everything I hoped for. I've seen the opera tank at high-toned places like the Salzburg Festival, where Claudio Abbado tried to smooth down the music's many rough edges. Roughness is the point in this feverish, dense, claustrophobic score - rendered by Salonen with dramatic clarity, backed by the imposing (but not prettified) Met orchestra sound.

The kind of events in this operatic slice of Russian prison life include the arrival of a new prisoner and inmates giving accounts of how they got there - most riveting, a confession of wife abuse sung by Peter Mattei with self-loathing restraint that's chilling and heartbreaking.

The production has no lack of theatricality. Early on, we see prisoners after their morning showers looking vulnerable in their nudity. The first act ends with what appears to be the roof caving in - which turns out to be a setup for the prisoner work detail in the following act.

Any production's success is judged partly on its emotional residue. The masterfully shot DG video made the prisoners seem like basically good people with fatally bad tempers. The Met has more violence. As bad as the prison is, the outside world they describe is even more brutal.

Both on stage and on video, there's a sense that the prison is a bit of an insane asylum with unhinged inmates who have become only more so. Chéreau creates a world with its own strange rules. Folk dance mutates to something resembling a seizure. Reactions among the characters have none of the usual cause-and-effect. The little entertainments they put on for one another are eccentric; the Met's stage version, in particular, confronts the homoerotic realities of prison life.

In other words, this piece treads in areas of the human soul rarely explored so unflinchingly by theater works of any kind, much less on an operatic scale. The Met's production has the one-time-only uniqueness of Nicholas Nickleby and The Mahabharata, though unlike them, From the House of the Dead's epic effect is contained, miraculously, within an intermissionless 90 minutes.