The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (77 page)

CD: Lilian Watson (Vixen); Simon Rattle (cond.).
EMI 7 54212 2

The Makropulos Case
(
The Makropulos Affair, Věc Makropulos
)

Three acts. First performed Brno, 1926.

Libretto by the composer

This extraordinary story – both ironic comedy and profound tragedy – is drawn from a play by Karel Čapek, premièred only months before Janáček began his operatic adaptation.

Plot

Prague, 1922.
The glamorous prima donna Emilia Marty has a secret: she is over three hundred years old.
In 1585, as Elina Makropulos, she was given an elixir of eternal life by her father, and since then she has continued to exist under a series of identities, retaining only the initials E.
M.

The outcome of a long-running inheritance lawsuit, Gregor
v.
Prus, is expected imminently.
Emilia shows remarkable knowledge of details of the case a century previously, including facts relating to Prus’s mistress Elian MacGregor and the existence of a crucial will.
After a performance at the opera house, Emilia holds court backstage.
Both Prus and Gregor, still arguing over the case, are infatuated with her, and Prus agrees to bring her a Greek document in his possession if she spends the night with him.
She agrees and after Prus has had his way with her, she then reveals her extraordinary story.
A century ago as ‘Elian MacGregor’ she passed the document, detailing the formula of the elixir, to her lover, Prus’s ancestor.
Now she needs to take the elixir again in order to renew herself, but she has decided that life holds no more joy or meaning for her.
She offers to pass the formula to Kristina, a girl who craves Emilia’s stardom and beauty.
But Kristina burns the document, and Emilia falls dead.

What to listen for

On first hearing,
The
Makropulos
Case
is not an easy opera to appreciate or enjoy: the setting is modern and urban, and the score’s idiom is therefore appropriately short-winded, edgy, dry, dissonant and modernist.
Until Emilia Marty’s ecstatic final monologue, almost everything is couched in quick-fire dialogue, allowing Janáček to pursue his fascination with rendering in music the melodic patterns of speech.
This makes it a text-heavy opera, and perhaps its only shortcoming is that the brilliant but heavy scoring makes it difficult in the theatre to follow the words.

Although her character is in many respects repellent, Emilia Marty offers a great role for a soprano like Anja Silja who can radiate the prima-donna mystique and open another dimension in the final scene capable of suggesting that only death gives beauty and purpose to life.
The overture, which paints a graphic picture of urban anxiety counterpointed against Emilia’s isolation, is the longest of any of Janáček’s operas.

In performance

Perhaps the harshest of Janáček’s operas,
The
Makropulos
Case
asks why humanity should crave immortality and proposes that only a normal lifespan can have meaning – eternity would actually be a hell of sheer monotony.
It is in such a hell that Emilia Marty is trapped, leaving her beyond both emotion and morality, cold, contemptuous and ruthless.
The characters surrounding her constitute a gallery of morally crooked fools, chasing their own tails in pursuit of their venal desires, and she despises them.

Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s fine production for Glyndebourne was dominated by a set which moved constantly but with almost imperceptible slowness, symbolizing the inexorable passage of time which governs human existence.

Recordings

CD: Elisabeth Söderström (Emilia Marty); Charles Mackerras (cond.).
Decca 430 372 2

Video: Anja Silja (Emilia Marty); Andrew Davis (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Warner 0630 14016 3

From the House of the Dead
(
Z mrtvého domu
)

Three acts (normally performed without an interval).

First performed Brno, 1930.

Libretto by the composer

Janáček’s last work, not quite finished when he died at the age of seventy-four in 1928.
Adapted from Dostoevsky’s early novel – libretto and music appear to have been written simultaneously – it is distinguished from the composer’s other major operas by its almost exclusively male cast (there are only two tiny female roles).
In accordance with its subject-matter, the score is harsh, angular and percussive, as well as ecstatically lyrical and passionately imbued with Janáček’s Christian humanism.

Plot

There is no plot in the ordinary sense: the opera consists of a series of episodes in the harsh life of the inmates of a Siberian prison camp in the mid-nineteenth century.
Goryanshikov arrives, having been convicted for political offences, and is flogged.
Prisoners tend an eagle with a wounded wing.
Goryanshikov offers to teach a Tartar boy to read.
Amid much squabbling and fighting, various prisoners tell their stories, and plays are performed.
Owing to a change in political circumstances, Goryanshikov is released.
The remaining prisoners symbolically set free the eagle, before returning to their harsh daily routine.

What to listen for

For all its grim setting and the absence of conventional aria or melody, this is an opera rich in all the variety and colours of human life.
In form, it has been described as an orchestral poem over which the text is played out – ‘take away Janáček’s words’, as the critic John Tyrrell suggests, ‘and, very often, you have a symphonic continuity which is virtually self-sufficient’.
It is also remarkable in having no single narrative focus, and no central characters: prisoners emerge to tell their stories and then disappear again into the mass.

The musical language is harmonically stark, built from the contrast and combination of short motifs, and austerely orchestrated.
Janáček uses instruments at the extreme ends of their registers (notably the top of the piccolo and the bottom of the trombone), as well as a wide range of percussion instruments, including an anvil and clanging chains.

In performance

The opera is less than two hours long, and best performed without an interval.
What a production should communicate is best conveyed by something written by Janáček himself: ‘I go into the minds of criminals and there I find a spark of God.
You will not wipe away the crimes from their brows, but equally you will not extinguish the spark of God.’ Several stagings have transplanted the action to the era of the Stalinist Gulag, but the setting really makes no difference – the implications of this opera are universal.

Recording