Ausrine Stundyte as the dying Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case. Photo: The Royal Opera ©2025 Camilla Greenwell
Exactly 100 years ago, Czech composer Leoš Janáček finished his late opera, The Makropulos Case, a work of startling modernity that overlaid a legal mystery with a fantastical foray into, if not everlasting, certainly long-lasting life.
Unconventional in his home life and experimental in his storylines and word-setting, Janáček is still exciting enough for most music-lovers, but in a new production of The Makropulos Case for the Royal Opera, director Katie Mitchell has decided, not for the first time, but apparently for the last, to ginger things up a bit. Followers of her work know Mitchell’s tropes, and here they come again – distracting additional material, obscured sight-lines, simulated sex acts, a lavatory…
The opera opens with the legal wrangle over an inheritance, for the want of a document that will prove the rightful heir. The charismatic and enigmatic opera singer Emilia Marty has information that changes everything, but seeks a second document. This is the formula for an elixir for which she was her physician father’s human guinea pig and which has prolonged her life by hundreds of years.
Ausrine Stundyte as Emilia Marty and Alan Oke as Count Hauk-Šendorf. Photo: The Royal Opera ©2025 Camilla Greenwell
Janáček, who eagerly based his opera on a new play by his countryman, the science fiction writer Karel Čapek, leaves us in no doubt as to the desirability of a life lived several times over. A young singer Kristina, renamed Krista, who idolises the older woman and aspires to a great musical career of her own, is handed the rediscovered formula – and burns it. But not here. Mitchell changes the opera’s ending, which is simply unforgivable. Krista keeps the formula. To use it? Who knows? A distracting invented hook-up between Marty and Krista, fixed by banal and vulgar dating app messages screened above the action is another crime against music, wrecking the important opening scenes.
Fortunately, with new music director Jakub Hrůša in the pit and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera on top form, there are pleasures that transcend this pseudo-feminist twaddle. Janáček’s airy score, sometimes elusive, always restless, flutters through the orchestra like an iridescent bird. The composer has his tropes too – the otherworldly brass, the translucent strings. Czech-born Hrůša is steeped in this music, and understands its power as well as its fragility.
Henry Waddington as Dr Kolenatý and Johan Reuter as Baron Prus. The Royal Opera ©2025 Camilla Greenwell
As Emilia Marty, Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte is the whole package – elegant, agile of form and voice, a walking puzzle. A slight steeliness in the voice is not in keeping for a character damaged in her youth and hardened by life. Stundyte illuminates Vicki Mortimer’s dull, present-day split set – an antiseptic hotel room, the hotel lobby, then a dressing room and a backstage area. Did costume designer Sussie Johnlin-Wallén deliberately make all the male characters look pretty much the same, or do they simply dissolve into each other so far back in the box set?
As the claimant Albert Gregor, whose true background is gradually revealed, American tenor Sean Panikkar stands out from this crowd, alongside tenor Alan Oke who, as a former lover of Marty, injects welcome humour and character. Bass-baritone Henry Waddington is lawyer Kolenatý, tenor Peter Hoare is clerk Vitek, father of Krista, and Danish baritone Johan Reuter is the predatory Baron Prus.
Stalwarts Susan Bickley (mezzo) and Jeremy White (bass) as opera house staff know their way through the stage door. Czech tenor Daniel Matoušek is Prus’s heir, Janek, here in cahoots with the inflated Krista. Chinese-American soprano Heather Engebretson deserves a medal for enacting with aplomb Mitchell’s wrong-headed concept that this minor character is a seducer, thief and murderer. The director is bowing out of opera. Cheerio.
The Makropulos Case is sung in Czech with English surtitles. Further performances are on 7, 10, 12, 19 and 21 November 2025
It was a curious, ultimately unsatisfying production, I think. Updating it to mark the opera’s centenary worked well enough in principle, though in adhering to Čapek’s original birth date for EM of 1575 (Janáček specified 1585 in order to set his opera squarely in 1922), Mitchell’s production is set in 2012 for no obvious reason.
It was small details like that which rather pulled the rug out from under this well-played and well-sung performance. Why, for example, have Janek killed onstage by Krista (abetted or otherwise by EM) when Janáček has him commit suicide (in despair of EM spending the night with his father, Janus) out of sight? It rather compromises the motivations in the ensemble final act.
Mitchell has stated that she wated to “make sense” of EM’s deathbed final action, gifting the formula to Krista who is almost a stranger. Having the two women as lovers might have worked if the concept were seen through consistently, but Krista is introduced as a grifter in cahoots with Janek – her boyfriend – out to con/steal from EM, so implicitly must be someone of recent acquaintance, rather undermining the concept. Yes, Krista falls under EM’s spell but surely would have done so previously had they known each other longer? It was not thought through, and did not convince, any more than Krista’s various attempts to disrobe, use her mobile while on the lavatory, or seduce EM did.
The set did not worry me overmuch, I thought it worked tolerably well given the misguided basic reworking of the plot. The distracting text messages I think worked well, given the updating to the C21st: after all, this was one of the first operas to feature prominently the telephone, still an exotic appliance in 1925.
The biggest flaw was with EM’s death scene, with no attempt made to represent her sudden rapid ageing as the formula wears off. THAT is what convinces the others that her fantastical tale is true and which other productions have managed. A difficult thing to achieve, for sure, but I recall the young Tom Conti ageing three decades in five seconds standing centre stage front in “The Sorrows of Frederick” by Romulus Linney (father of actress Laura Linney) just through gesture, posture, the way he stooped in defeat. This production, for all its bustle, couldn’t even rustle up a grey wig for the ailing EM. Poor.