Five Reasons to Love Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair

Janáček based his opera on a play by fellow Czech Karel Čapek. The original – a rather wordy thriller – wasn’t an obvious candidate for operatic treatment. But Janáček saw potential in its core message: the meaninglessness of a life extended well beyond its natural length.

The story revolves around a potion, created in the 16th century on the orders of a Habsburg Emperor, designed to bring long life to whomever drank it. When its creator – a physician called Hieronymos Makropulos – is forced to test it on his daughter, she proves its effectiveness by living for 300 years.

The action takes place in 1920s Prague, set amidst an ongoing probate dispute between two families. Elina, who has assumed various identities throughout her long life, though always with the initials ‘EM’, now goes by Emelia Marty. She is a beautiful and famous opera singer – but her 300 years are nearly up. She becomes embroiled in the legal battle, hoping to gain access to a secret will, which she knows contains the potion’s lost recipe – and thus the key to another 300 years.

But in her attempts to obtain the recipe, her resolve falters and she is forced to confront the tragedy of a lingering, futile existence.

In a genre historically dominated by men, and featuring so many simplistic or stereotyped female roles, The Makropulos Affair is notable for its lovingly crafted central character.

We get a sense of how invested Janáček was in Marty from letters he wrote to his muse Kamila Stösslová. One, written a month after Čapek’s play opened, captures the spark of inspiration: ‘A woman 337 years old, but at the same time still young and beautiful? … And you know that she was unhappy? We are happy because we know that our life isn’t long. So it’s necessary to make use of every moment, to use it properly.’

Janáček’s fascination bears out in the opera, which he completed almost exactly three years later. Marty is by far the most arresting personality. She is cold, insulting and carelessly seductive. But she can also be tender. And, when she reveals her story in the third-act denouement, it is set to music of such extraordinary pathos that we pity and love her all the same.

Janáček wrote the libretto himself, showcasing his skill as a dramatist as well as a composer. Taking a mundane urban setting and a script stuffed with legal argument, he spins a compelling operatic spectacle.

Every character, from Marty down to the most minor role, is expertly drawn: Dr Kolenatý with his dry, exacting manner; his clerk’s daughter, Kristina, and her boyfriend Janek, both wildly infatuated with Marty; Kolenatý’s client Albert Gregor, full of febrile, nervous energy.

Underpinning the drama is a score rich with symbolism and musical effects. In Act II, for example, when the senile Hauk-Šendorf enters to the sound of castanet rhythms: the old man had once courted one of Marty’s previous identities, Eugenia Montez, in Andalusia; the theme is heard again in a grotesque rescoring as Marty addresses him in Spanish. Another highlight comes in the opera’s climax: as Marty sings of a life without meaning, an off-stage male chorus repeats her words, adding an otherworldly dimension to her grief.

‘If someone doesn’t like opera, take them to see Janáček’
Sir Simon Rattle, conductor

The Makropulos Affair was Janáček’s penultimate opera. By now his musical style had evolved from that of his breakthrough success, Jenůfa, which had premiered in 1904. The folklore elements and ‘speech melodies’ – inspired by his native language – that had suffused that work were no longer as prevalent. Instead, we find increasingly wild experiments in rhythm, harmony and orchestration.

The breathless prelude to Act I is a case in point: here jagged rhythms underscore a rich, velveteen melody, interjected by wild fanfares for off-stage brass and timpani. The whole passage is a masterclass in musical precarity. It oozes expectation. The Act III finale, meanwhile, contains perhaps the most evocative moment in the opera as Marty reveals her real name, her colossal soprano soaring atop a shimmering orchestra.

Of course, such music is difficult to pull off. During the rehearsals for the premiere some were worried it could not be done – indeed, the huge demands placed on performers are one of the reasons The Makropulos Affair is so rarely performed today. But the premiere went ahead, in Brno on 18 December 1926, and proved a huge success.

Janáček wrote six more operas after Jenůfa, each markedly different from the last. There is the peculiarly autobiographical Osud, for example, or The Cunning Little Vixen with its fantastical forest world. His final opera, From the House of the Dead, seeks a ‘spark of humanity’ among Dostoyevsky’s most wretched creatures. The Makropulos Affair is yet another work that laughs in the face of convenient classification.

Such choices neatly reflect the oddity of his entire operatic career. Unlike Verdi, who wrote (mostly) successful operas throughout his life, or Rossini, who retired in his late 30s, Janáček didn’t come into his own as a composer of operas until after the age of 50.

It’s a welcome reminder that age is just a number – and that, for many of us, the best is yet to come.

Written by Timmy Fisher, sub-editor within the BBC Proms Publications team, co-host of The Classical Music Pod, writer and journalist.