Edinburgh Festival Fringe: The Makropulos Case

ON A set that is vaguely reminiscent of Mad Men – an office space dotted with mid-century furniture – a statuesque woman perches in an armchair, insouciantly flicking through a magazine. There’s something of Maria Callas about her. Or maybe Jackie Kennedy. There are others on the stage – they are all men, buttoned into their three-piece suits, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair slicked to their heads. They scuttle about, stealing glances in her direction, caught in a confusion of lust and fear.

In one of the final rehearsals for Opera North’s production of The Makropulos Case, which opens tonight, Ylva Kihlberg has the daunting task of incarnating the mysterious Emilia Marty, one of Leos Janacek’s most intriguing creations. An opera diva, a woman who can drive men to suicide such is their desire for her, Marty is both mesmerising and monstrous. Before she even appears on stage we know how she fascinates both men and women, young and old. There is something magnetic and indefinable about her, something at once alluring and perhaps just a little frightening.

“Is she in her thirties?” one character, Albert Gregor, asks, when he first hears of the great singer, before the audience has seen or heard her.

“At least. But beautiful,” replies the teenage Kristina, a novice singer who, in Marty, has just found the ultimate role model.

But in fact, Emilia Marty is much older than Kristina suggests.

Marty was born Elina Makropulos in Crete 337 years ago. Her father, a physician to the emperor, developed a potion to grant immortality but the emperor made him test it on his teenage daughter and so began Elina’s long life. By the time we meet her she is in need of another dose to live another 300 years. The question is: does she really want to?

Janacek only began writing operas at the age of 50. Perhaps best known for The Cunning  Little Vixen, his penultimate composition was The Makropulos Case, inspired by fellow Czech Karel Capek’s philosophical and comedic stage play, which Janacek saw just weeks after it opened.

Janacek was one of the most successful opera composers at writing his own libretti, turning dense works (his final opera was Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead) into dramatic operas with scores of both spiky menace and stunning beauty. Even for Janacek, though, the plot of The Makropulos Case is labyrinthine.

“There are so many intricacies I’m actually not sure that Janacek follows them through precisely,” says Richard Farnes, music director of Opera North, who will conduct tonight’s opening Edinburgh performance. The case Farnes refers to is a century-old legal wrangle, a dispute between two families yet to be settled, which provides the backdrop for the appearance of the mysterious and beautiful Marty, who unexpectedly turns up and inexplicably offers the solution to the case. How can she know the intricacies of the personalities involved more than a hundred years ago, those caught up in the case wonder? Not least Gregor, the feckless man who is hoping the outcome of the case will provide him with an inheritance substantial enough to wipe out his debts.

“I always think of Gregor as being like one of the wards of Jarndyce [the character in Dickens’s Bleak House],” says tenor Paul Nilon. “He’s an orphan. He’s lacked love and can’t settle in anything. He’s lived his entire life on tick, it’s all borrowed, all artifice. And then this extraordinary woman walks into his life and she has this kind of magic that makes him feel alive for the first time.

“And yet, although it’s an incredibly joyful thing it’s also terrifying. The terror of loving someone for the first time is frightening. Emilia frightens him. There’s a moment in one scene when he asks, ‘What has happened in your life?’ and she turns away, she can’t tell him.”

When Janacek was writing The Makropulos Case he was approaching the age of 70 and was, at that time, infatuated with Kamila Stosslova, a woman half his age. It’s not difficult to find evidence in the opera of his keen understanding of the incredible power that women can have over men, but what is more interesting is that Janacek allows Marty to be a more nuanced character than the vampish, manipulative monster she might be. Both in the score, particularly in the glorious third act, and in the libretto, Janacek reveals that Marty is as she is because of what she has experienced in her long life: not just loss, but also the violence of men who have wanted her. Janacek explores the nature of desire and comes up with a portrayal that is both violent and haunting.

“Janacek is so good at that because he gives us different layers in the music of Emilia,” says Kihlberg. “We see and hear so many different dimensions of her story, especially in the third act when she tells the story of her life.

“It is a challenge but I’m really enjoying myself. I love it, I do. It is so chatty and complex in the  beginning and then, in the third act, it just opens up and becomes this romantic super-opera in which I really need to sing.”

Farnes agrees that the challenges of Janacek’s score for both the singers and the orchestra are significant but the “odd grammar” of Janacek’s composition is what lends it its depth.

“When I think of this opera until the third act, I think of it as very conversational, based around words and not very mellifluous,” says Farnes, “but actually what I’ve realised this time, even in the scene in which Gregor is in love with Marty but she’s not interested in him, the music is very genuinely propelling that love forward even though it’s unrequited. You sense from that that Marty does know what love is, that she has been in love, she understands how it works. In a sense Janacek betrays that even when emotionally Marty is going against it.”

As to the central question of the piece: if you could, would you want to live forever? I wonder how Kihlberg would answer?

“If I’d been asked that question a year ago I might have a different answer, but after working on this I know I wouldn’t want to live forever. I think it must be so, so hard. Just think of all the people you have to say goodbye to. Every single person you meet, the children you give birth to, you would know that they would leave before you and that must be devastating.”

• The Makropulos Case, Festival Theatre, tonight and 13 August. Today 7:15pm.