The Makropulos Affair

Věc Makropulos
Opera in three acts

MUSIC Leoš Janáček
LIBRETTO Karel Čapek

CREATED at the National Theater, Brno on December 18, 1926

SHOW IN CZECH WITH FRENCH OVERTITLES

Spared death and the ravages of old age for three hundred years, Emilia Marty comes to see this dream for what it truly is : a monotonous and insipid nightmare. What good is life when everything you love perishes ? What good is love if it must begin a hundred times over and over again ? In an escape without end in time, that parades people and things before you, their identities and singularities, the past and the present dissolve and dissipate. Stripping away everything but yourself, time no longer shares but leaves a void peopled with ghosts of flesh or dust. Without an end to give value and meaning, the moment reaches an insufferable eternity. For this lesson on death for the living, Janáček invents music of singular modernity, at times austere, dense, acerbic, expressionist and oppressive. The vocal writing melds into “sung speech”, allowing it to follow both the intense rhythm of extreme theatrical dialogue and the slightest emotional inflections of the characters, culminating in Emilia’s final monologue, which at the end of this all-too-long voyage finally attains the peaceful liberation of appeasing death, thus restoring her full humanity. At last, the drastic lyricism until then compressed now pours out, the voice rising, with a sudden dilation of the entire orchestra, towards the infinite dimensions of the universe.