How old is Emilia Marty?

The poor old thing can barely remember herself - 337 she says, only to be worn down to a confused 327 under cross-examination (or is that a piece of last-minute vanity)? Well, it's perhaps a pedantic detail given the looking-glass-versus-realistic world of Janacek's opera The Makropulos Case (though I've always felt it was the biggest spoiler for this supposed thriller to lead with 'opera about a 337-year old woman's quest to regain the elixir of youth', but there's no avoiding it if you want people to come to performances).

One thing seems fixed: Elina Makropulos was born in 1585, took the potion invented by her father as court magician to Emperor Rudolf II in 1601 when she was 16, and never grew old - until 1922, when she comes to get a refresher dose. What a terrible abuse, the forcing of the experiment on to a young girl (and as Marty points out, it was a waste of time, because how could Rudolf know if she'd live for 300 years?). It's something David Alden's English National Opera production made a great deal of, and it accounted for Amanda Roocroft's portrayal of 'E.M.' as an infantilised prima donna. Which worked fine, and proved very moving until the final scene (photo by Neil Libbert).


Where I think Alden copped out was in what some saw as a stunning surprise at the end. One thing I will say is that it's not what either Janacek or his astonishingly prophetic, modern source, the playwright Karel Capek, wanted. The potion has been touted round all the men and, in the play, debated by them from various angles - idealistic, hedonistic, eugenic - until they reject it. And then the mostly silent but always sympathetic young singer Krista takes the document - and burns it. A liberating gesture, surely, whether or not Marty dies at the end of the piece (in the play she simply laughs and says 'the end of immortality!' - curtain).*

Lehnhoff's Glyndebourne production got it right, I think, leaving the final scene as a confrontation between Marty and Krista, the only person who really reaches out to her in the entire opera. The City Lit students who've been following me through The Makropulos Case in our six Opera in Focus classes on Janacek's masterpiece were all bewitched by Anja Silja's iconic performance, and those who'd only seen the ENO production, much as they admired it, had to admit that this was on a whole different level. I like the fact, too, that the glorious Anja was supposed to be celebrating her 60th birthday when I finally interviewed her at Glyndebourne but - well, rumours were that actually that milestone had been passed a couple of years earlier...

I still count her Marty and Kostelnicka among the handful of greatest performances I've ever seen. I do wish I'd caught Soderstrom in the role on stage, though. On the terrific Decca recording with Mackerras conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, she inflects every line so meaningfully that I like to think you'd get the gist of it even without having the English translation to hand.


Now we need to campaign for a good, strong staging of the original drama (I'd also love to see Capek's R.U.R., the work that brought the word 'robot' into the language, and his Insect Play). The opera follows it almost slavishly for the first two acts, but its third is very much a condensation of Capek's acts three and four in which Janacek gives musical lyricism and liberation their head. I wept almost as much in the Arcola Theatre staging of Preissova's Jenufa, adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, as I always do in the opera, so surely this would be a worthwhile case? Capek's Makropulos Case is more brittle and even funnier than Janacek's, but how incredibly timely it remains.


As I'm sure the scriptwriter for Robert Zemeckis's Hollywoood black comedy Death Becomes Her must have realised. I've watched the film three times now, and last Monday I played the students the scene in which Meryl Streep visits the mistress of the mysterious elixir (Isabella Rossellini, so camp). This was Streep doing masterly comedy way before The Devil Wears Prada and Mamma Mia! She and the equally wonderful Goldie Hawn, a little shall we say padded out in a very funny early scene, transcend any limitations the film might have, and Bruce Willis is amusing, too, as a plastic surgeon turned mortuary beautician. Here's a witty montage set to Marilyn's 'I wanna be loved by you', the number Streep's ageing star performs at the beginning of the film.



And now for something completely serious, but as joyous and as life affirming as Janacek's opera. The six-minute trailer - some trailer - I was originally showing has since been 'removed for copyright reasons', which seems a bit small minded. The documentary in question, 'Alice Dancing Under the Gallows' focuses on Alice Herz-Sommer, about to turn 107 on 26 November. Having survived Theresienstadt, this astonishingly optimistic woman loves life more than ever and remains fascinated by other people (she also still plays the piano amazingly well). I'm not saying that this is how it ought to have been for all holocaust survivors: we will never forget the ones who committed suicide so many decades later, or indeed my dear friend Trude Winik who suffered agonising guilt about the family she left behind in Vienna - they were sent to Treblinka - every day until she died, not to mention long bouts of depression. But this shows that affirmation is possible too.

What a rich counterpoint to Marty's tired 337-year-old declaration that the soul has died within her is Hertz-Sommer's 'only when we are old are we aware of the full beauty of life'. An example to everyone alive - not to say, 'this is how everyone ought to be', but 'this is how we could be if only we were good enough.'

*Alden isn't the only one to change the essential meaning and leave the recipe unburnt. I just read that at the end of Graham Vick's Mariinsky production, our heroine throws the piece of paper into the orchestra pit. I'm not saying these endings would be wrong if they provided an equally compelling alternative to Krista's setting light to the document, but I can't see that they do.

Celestial spheres and curate's eggs

Good in parts is the best I can clergically say for everything I've seen in the last week - except Alvin Ailey's troupe, that is, which was wholly inspirational in terms of the execution, though even there the choreography could be dodgy in places. No need to recap on Jurowski's fascinating Mahler 3 with the oh-so-slow (but still oh-so-well-played) finale nor Gergiev's horrid Shchedrin and masterly Musorgsky-Ravel; both I've written up on The Arts Desk, so click on those links if you want to read further.

I must say I wondered if I was going to agree at first with colleague Igor's rave about Niobe, Regina di Tebe at the Royal Opera - and I went because of his review and what a charming student, Caroline Kennedy, had written about it. I detected only three and a bit signs of blazing originality in the hitherto-obscure Steffani's first act, chiefly the string revolutions of the celestial spheres observed in his Palace of Harmony by King Anfione (the self-styled Polish 'soprano and tenor' Jacek Laszczkowski, pictured above by Bill Cooper, who took the Royal Opera shots it's now OK again to feature on blogs, thanks to all the comment fuss over at Intermezzo). There were also an irregular, dancing ditty and a quirky lovesong respectively for secondary lovers Tiberino (Lothar Odinius) and Manto (Amanda Forsythe).

Then, in the second and third acts, the wonders of Lukas Hemleb's sometimes bizarrely costumed Schwetzingen-originated production began to work together with Steffani's more outlandish inspiration. Laszczkowski, a singer of rare stage presence but holey technique (cloudy middle range beneath stunning soprano top), elevated with Anfione's divine illusion


and his consort Niobe (Veronique Gens) sported in equally illusory fashion with the false Mars of Creon (Iestyn Davies). They get a gorgeous duet and a levitational scene with floating balloons which worked its way into my dreams last night.


The fascination of the mangled myth, so horrifically treated in Ovid's Metamorphoses (I re-read the Ted Hughes translation before going to sleep last night), takes over for the closing scene. The would-be divine consorts have their hubris duly punished; their children are slaughtered, Anfione stabs himself and his life leaks away in an extraordinary chromatic death scene that peters out, while Niobe turns to stone in an even sparer number that also has no chance to conclude. Gens turned in an exemplary, fashion-plate Niobe, inspected here as a golden statue by Tiresias (Bruno Taddia) and nurse Nerea (Delphine Galou).


With the exception of Laszczkowski's erratic vocals, more than mitigated by his handsome charisma, the cast was outstanding, with Davies (seen here in his iffy get-up with Alastair Miles's Poliferno in tow) the most stylish of the lot.


The vitality which suggested that perhaps there was more good music in the work than is in fact the case came from Thomas Hengelbrock and his electrifying Balthasar Neumann Ensemble. O numi, o ciel, the second barockfest I've enjoyed in a month - what's come over me?

Whereas David Alden's production of Janacek's The Makropulos Case at English National Opera was a known quantity, one I'd been stunned by when Cheryl Barker took on the role of the 337-year-old diva heroine first time round. I thought this was going to be just as good: Richard Armstrong proved both precise and headlong stepping into the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras's shoes; Amanda Roocroft caught the playful side of Emilia Marty's bizarre historical perspectives very well in the first two acts and pierced the soul in her asides about her dried-out life (photographs for ENO by Neil Libbert).


The great final scene, however, lacked for me both the cosmic perspectives opened up by Anja Silja in Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Glyndebourne production and the sheer vocal allure of Barker last time round (Roocroft can't always be heard, and you never know whether the sound above the stave is going to come out frayed or spot-on).


Plus there's the problem of the way Alden stages the end. I take his point about the men who've always dictated the way E.M. led her life, and I liked the use of the blackboard to spell out the complications of the legal case, the simplicity of the essence ('Makropulos' in Greek) and the algebra of the immortality potion. But the supposedly spectacular coup of the formula sticking to the heroine's hand at the end won't do.

I discussed this with the City Lit students last night (we're spending five weeks on the opera). They're an open-minded bunch, and fans of Jones et al for the most part, but they were surprised when I read them the stage directions: 'Krista [the young girl previously infatuated with Marty's divadom] takes the document and holds it over a flame until it catches fire. Stage lighting changes to red. Marty: Pater hemon [Our Father, not translated at ENO]? (crumpling up). The document is consumed in the flames'.

What's more, we hear the flames in the music. But the way Alden played it out, the ending was indeed as nihilistic as Igor found it. No liberation from the hell of everlasting life, no purification. That has to be wrong. At least we got real fires (and how) in Niobe.