Catcalls and cheers at Covent Garden: ‘The Makropulos Case’

The Makropulos Case was originally a play by the great Czech author Karel Capek involving a legal case that has been going on for some 300 years. It concerns an inheritance dispute between the aristocratic Prus family and the middle class Gregor family, illegitimate descendants of a Prus nobleman who died in the 1820s. Oddly enough it attracts the attention of a famous opera singer named Emilia Marty. She is the latest personification of Elena Makropulos, who is anxious to acquire the formula for the vital elixir created by her father Hieronymus Makropulos, an alchemist at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in the late sixteenth century. She needs it to continue extending her extraordinary life, but once gave it to her lover Baron Prus, and it is now somewhere among his papers. When Janacek decided to turn this story into an opera, Capek was surprised, as it doesn’t easily lend itself to operatic treatment. But the composer was evidently inspired to produce a work of unexpected depth.

The story is complex, so any operatic treatment needs to be quite simple, but this new production for the Royal Opera by Katie Mitchell has gone to the opposite extreme. The stage is split, sometimes into two, sometimes three parts, added to which a space above the action and below the surtitles is used to show pictures and modern text messages. That is all too complicated, and spoils the production. Her representation of Emilia Marty as involved in a lesbian relationship, including a sexual interlude, is neither here nor there. It doesn’t offend the basic story, but the text messages made this production one of the most irritating I’ve ever seen. They smack of desperation by the director to update the original 1922 setting by 100 years.

A reviewer I bumped into outside Covent Garden at the end said he thought it was Ms Mitchell’s way of raising the middle finger to opera as she retires from directing at the relatively early age of 61. This was her parting shot, but it is unfortunately aimed at an opera by a brilliant and original composer, adding distortions to the English surtitles and inserting things that aren’t there in the original Czech. Like Wagner, Janacek wrote his own librettos, but if the opera house were to allow deliberate distortions to the surtitles of a Wagner opera it would be hugely criticised, as a significant number of the audience have read the original text.

As it was, there were sustained and vigorous boos from a section of the audience, following terrific applause for the singers, particularly the spectacular performance of the Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte as Emilia/Elena. You couldn’t do better in this demanding role, and she was brilliantly supported by the excellent Johan Reuter as Baron Jaroslav Prus, along with the young American tenor Sean Pannikar as Albert Gregor. The lawyer Dr. Kolenaty (Henry Waddington), Vitek his clerk (Peter Hoare), Vitek’s daughter Krista (Heather Engbretson) and Baron Prus’s son Janek (Daniel Matoušek) — the latter two in a relationship of sorts, but both under the spell of the beautiful Emilia Marty — also gave very fine performances, along with a cameo by Alan Oke as a wheelchair-bound Count Hauk-Sendorf, a previous lover.

At the end Marty decides to destroy the formula for eternal life and take death as it comes, though in this production she merely abandons it and offers it to her lover Krista instead. Musically this performance was outstanding, under the baton of the Royal Opera’s new music director Jakub Hrusa. We are extremely lucky to have him in London. As a Czech himself he knows the opera very well, but was probably not consulted by Ms Mitchell about her textual alterations in the English surtitles. She got away with it — much to the annoyance of some.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.