Janáček's strange selection of stories for operas is strangest in The Makropulos Case. No little foxes, this time, and no claustrophobic small village. No reaching for the sounds of Nature - nature is excluded from the locations. We're thrown into a philosophical debate about immortality in the dry setting of a legal office. Perhaps the only common theme is that like his earlier operas, it's a story about a woman and what she could become - and its music tells how she struggled and failed, and (perhaps) triumphed.
The Makropulos Story
Janáček didn't make it up - as before, he's taken a play and written his own libretto from it. Premiered 1926, it was his second to last opera. Věc Makropulos was a Czech play by Karel Čapek (he's the one who invented 'robot'). Věc translates to Thing but the title more significantly is given as Affair, Case, or Secret - all of which hold clues to the plot. And what a plot!
Take just 9 minutes to get hold of the story and the excitement of this extraordinary opera, from the excited Dave Hurwitz here. 'If you were to set life to music, it would sound like this.'
Central is a diva - like most divas, clinging to eternal beauty and fame, but unlike most, having achieved it for over three centuries. The story and the music tell of the tedium of long life even with centuries of success, and the chill of distance from warm normal life. (Our composer very explicitly linked this to the cold reception to his advances by Kamila Stösslová, a married woman 40 years his junior.)
Opera North posted this brief video about this opera's amazing central character and her music.
'It’s the only opera I know starring a diva who’s over 300 years old, and still entrancing anyone who hears her. 16 year old Elina Makropulos was used as a guinea pig by her father, court physician to Emperor Rudolf II, who forced him to test an elixir of eternal life on his daughter. That was back in 1601…since when Elina fled Prague, changing her name every generation through Eugenia Montez, Elsa Müller, Ellian MacGregor…always E. M.
'In 1924, back in Prague as Emilia Marty and with the elixir’s potency seeming at last to be coming to an end, she has a chance to find the formula because of a lawsuit involving the valuable estate of one of her old lovers, over a century earlier…but to get it she may have to sleep with her old flame’s great great great great great grandson, or possibly his son – and after three centuries, she’s no longer that interested in sex… Unlikely material for an opera, but this was Janáček approaching 70, and aflame with desire for a married woman less than half his age, inspired by her to new heights of creativity. In ‘The Makropulos Case’ he’s comparing his heroine’s coldness and selfish behaviour to that of his reluctant muse.'
Trivia item: The Makropulos Affair was the first opera to feature a telephone call.
From play to opera
As in all his other works, Janáček took an existing play and changed it. In this case, he softened the message of Čapek, who argued (against George Bernard Shaw! - see PS below) that a prolonged life would be destructive. Čapek's Emelia is all pretty nasty confirmed personality disorders. Janáček saw the ageless individual more as pathetically isolated and alone, so the destruction of the secret formula is celebrated in musical beauty. He also altered the ending - Čapek had her laughing hysterically, but in the opera, to glorious music, she finally dies.
That music
Widely regarded as the pinnacle of Janáček's late modernist composing, this opera is also a huge challenge, for singers and orchestras - and indeed, for commentators! Here's Simon Rattle, who took it to Berlin for the first time. In many ways it's the most difficult, most complicated and most modernist of Janáček's works, he says, but at its most difficult and complicated 'it has such an incredible beating heart and such passion that it's irresistible.' He warned the orchestra they would simply fall about laughing at the impossibility of playing this - and they did.
The music director of Welsh National Opera (accompanied by images from the production in images above) goes further, describing this opera as 'one of the most difficult pieces of music theatre ever written'. But just listen to his love for it!
Or try this description: 'a restless, roiling torrent of astringent angularity, pungent folk harmonies and sudden, fragmented moments of lyric beauty'. Most of the music is demanding and unlyrical, telling conversations and conflicts. but as Dave Hurwitz comments, it 'pulsates with life... If you were to set life to music it would sound like Janacek.' Until the opera's end. Andrew McGregor again: '…the chilly abrasiveness of the libretto is matched by Janáček’s music: tough, uncompromising, with a series of tense exchanges and no extended arias. But that changes in the third act, as Emilia starts to lose her battle with the ageing process; as the rest of the cast discover her real identity, Janáček’s score warms, and blossoms into a radiantly beautiful conclusion.'
It of course requires and extraordinary diva. The wonderful Finnish soprano Karita Mattila (image right) sang her debut as Emilia Marty in San Francisco, 2010. Review here. 'Makropulos is a fabulous piece in both senses of the word, with restless, sharp-edged, brilliantly scored music in the composer’s highly individual late style, and a plot that has Faustian and comedic elements.'
Now, assess it for yourself. This clip shows the last 25 minutes of the opera in the SFO production - no subtitles, just listen, to get the mix of music drama.
Our production
Glyndebourne produced the opera first in 1995, (our recording is from that year.) It repeated in in 2001. In both the (appropriately ageing!) diva playing Emilia was Anja Silja, and all reviews agree she triumphs in the role. 'Although she has said the fact that Marty is a singer doesn't make the role any easier to assume, and although she lacks the superior preciousness attributed to some of her colleagues, it has to be said that Silja does have the selfish, world-weary diva to perfection.
It's not impossible to believe that so many men flap around her like moths at a 100-watt light bulb.' This is a review from 2001.
There's a thoughtful interview with her in 1996, here. She comments, 'The character I like the most now is Emilia Marty in The Makropoulos Case. This was the one who, if I may say so, almost was composed for me, was meant for me. I feel like Emilia Marty since I started so young. I started at the age of six and never stopped singing, so I feel a little bit like her. She’s three hundred fifty years old and I’m only in my fifties, but thinking back it seems as if I was always on stage. So there is a little bit of similarity in it. Also the complication of life and the up and downs reminds me very much of my own life. I can really sympathize with her, but besides that, not really. '
And the music in our production? ''The playing by the LPO under Davis is very fine, as one is aware from the very beginning of the overture, in which typical Janáček motoric rhythms alternate with moments of impassioned lyricism. ... The obsessive two note phrases in brass and timpani become a wake-up call for the dozing legal clerk Vítek – as the orchestra cuts off, the alarm clock on his desk goes off – the production is full of touches like that, witty but significant brush-strokes which enliven the whole thing... This is opera at its best, exploring the often uncomfortable interface between intellect and intuition, between emotion and cold realism.' More here in that review at Music Web.
Full opera online?
There's no staged full version of this opera to be found on YouTube, but there is a full opera concert version from March 2024. A wonderful way to revisit that amazing music.
It's live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam: by the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest with fabulous young conductor Karina Canellakis. British soprano Sally Matthews is Emilia. Enjoy!
A P.S. About Janáček's women
In her 2016 piece in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins asked 'Is opera the most misogynistic art form?' One exception to her overwhelming agreement was this opera. 'How many operas pass the Bechdel test? To leap American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s feminist hurdle, a work of fiction must contain two women, who have a conversation, not about men. Opera has a pathetically small pass rate.'
'Of all of [Janáček's] operas, The Makropulos Case – with its extreme, otherworldly score, full of galloping tympani and strident lyricism – is my favourite. Deeply strange, it has a wildly complex backstory. Suffice it to say that the main character, Emilia Marty, took an elixir some 300 years ago, and at the time of the opera’s setting is still youthful and is earning her way as an opera singer. She is worshipped by the young Kristina... At the end of the opera Marty confesses to the existence of the elixir, reveals that she was born Elina Makropulos, and prepares for the end of her life. She offers the elixir’s formula to Kristina (thus allowing the opera to pass the Bechdel test) who sensibly sets fire to it. In my mind it is forever bound up with seeing Anya Silja, aged 61, sing it at Glyndebourne. Men fluttered around her like moths. She was sexy as hell and completely ageless, Garbo one minute, Dietrich the next. A powerful woman, in control.'
And about Immortality - another postscript.
Improbably, George Bernard Shaw comes in here - Čapek was responding to Shaw's alleged advocacy for immortality in Man and Superman (1903). It's a frequent feature in inspiring quotes online - (as illustrated.)
"This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." Here's the whole play, to entertain you if it's raining: (the quote is in the loong Prologue, three paras up).
But hey, the play doesn't have the other chunk in most copies of the inspiring quote about his life belonging to the whole community! (They seem to me very different declarations.)
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
So I went hunting for the original, discovering in this blog that internet quick-wisdom has linked the two, as Shaw didn't.
Meanwhile if you want more learned reflections on immortality, there are plenty. In the early 70s, Bernard Williams published an article about the desirability of immortality, arguing against Čapek and starting a long discussion. He titled it, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”. Lots more here!
Ah, the tedium of philosophy?
Lyn, 25/11/24
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