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.

[1] Janáček worked on this opera from February 1927 to 8 June 1928,[2] 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.

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, Otakar Zítek [cs] made changes to the text and sequence of events in the opera.

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, in an attempt to convey human heartlessness.

The prisoners lament their fate ("Neuvidí oko již"); one of them, Skuratov, recalls his previous life in Moscow ("Já mlada na hodech byla").

The prisoners finish work as a holiday begins and a priest blesses the food and the river ("Alexandr Petrovič, bude prazdnik").

For the holiday, the prisoners stage a play about Don Juan and Kedril ("Dnes bude můj poslední den") and the pantomime about a beautiful, but unfaithful miller's wife ("Pantomima o pěkné mlynářce").

A drunk prison governor apologises to Goryantchikov for the whipping and tells him that he has been pardoned and is free ("Petrovičí, já jsem tě urazil").