Finnish soprano Karita Mattila dons a Marilyn Monroe wig and lets her hair down as the 337 year-old protagonist

By David Rubin

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Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case is an opera for playgoers who think they don’t like opera.  It is heavy on plot and dialogue, short on conventional operatic duets and trios.  The singers hold forth in Janácek’s distinctive speech melody, bent to fit the rhythms of the Czech language.  The music supports and underscores the action on stage.  It’s a comedy, a thriller and a mystery rolled into one, with a genuinely cathartic conclusion.  Janácek based the opera on a play by Karel Capek written in 1922, and that’s probably worth seeing, too.

The opera is tailor-made for a diva.  Its lead character, Elina Makropulos, is 337 years old, although she hardly looks a day over 40.  She has spent many of those years singing opera under a variety of names, all with the initials E.M.  In the late 1500s her father invented an elixir that delivered this life span to her.  At the time of the opera, the mid-1920s, she is calling herself Emilia Marty, and her time is running out.  She needs the recipe for that elixir to keep the beat going.  The plot focuses on her efforts to recover the recipe while those around her try to figure out who she really is.

In the role of Emilia Marty the Met offered a real-life diva, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, and it was a good match.  E.M. is, understandably, getting a bit weary after 337 years of sex, singing, and sashaying around Europe from century to century.  Her boredom is clear when she asks a young couple if they have yet experienced sexual intercourse.  Before they can answer, she exclaims, “It’s not worth it,” and then adds, “Nothing is worth it.  Absolutely nothing.”  

Coiffed in a Marilyn Monroe wig, and with her overt sexuality on full display (including a scene in a slip, legs akimbo on a couch), Mattila was thoroughly believable as the brassy, alluring, arch E.M.  Men are desperate to bed her, and one commits suicide for her.  The audience does not have to suspend its disbelief.

Where Mattila was less convincing, however, was in the final 20 minutes, the climax to which this opera builds in two hours of tense music.  E.M. has managed to get the recipe for the elixir from Jaroslav Prus, whose ancestor was E.M.’s lover a hundred years earlier.  She bribes Prus with a roll in the hay in her hotel room.  (Prus found her frigid.  No surprise there.)  

But once she has the recipe, Mattila decides—in an extended and powerful aria that ends the opera—not to make use of it.  She has it burned.  Life without end is not worth living, she concludes, and so she embraces death.  

To make this spectacular scene work, the singer must be more than brassy.  She must exhibit a vulnerable side. She must become smaller as she sings.  But Mattila maintained her larger than life presence right to the end, when she walks into flames at the back of the stage, Don Giovanni style.  (This staging is all wrong: She should disintegrate and turn to dust before our eyes, as any 337 year-old would.)  So, despite an excellent performance for most of the opera, Mattila failed to deliver a chill in the finale.  The audience should stop breathing in the final 20 minutes, as she makes her decision.  That didn’t happen.

The Met surrounded Mattila with a terrific supporting cast of singing actors.  The veteran Richard Leech handled the high-flying heroic tenor role of Gregor with vigor.  E.M. gave birth to Gregor’s great-great-whatever grandfather years before, so his romantic lusting for her is creepy.  Leech was believable as the love-besotted relative, not that he ever quite figured out his incestuous feelings.

Tom Fox still has his villainous bass-baritone, and he used it to full effect as the lawyer Kolenaty.  Tenor Bernard Fitch was an amusing character as the aged and demented Count Hauk-Sendorf, who had an affair with E.M. 50 years earlier when she was Eugenia Montez, in Spain.  He can’t believe his luck that he’s found her again—although he is a bit puzzled that she hasn’t aged.

The one weak spot among the major characters was Christopher Feigum, who was replacing the scheduled singer in the role of Prus.  His baritone was too light and his stage presence too deferential to E.M.  He lacked the gravitas of a baron.  The smaller roles of the lawyer Vitek (Alan Oke), and the young lovers Kristina (Emalie Savoy) and Janek (Matthew Plenk) were in capable hands.

Elijah Moshinsky (yet another E.M.) designed this production in 1996 for Jessye Norman.  It still looks great and works well.  Act One is a lawyer’s office, dominated by cabinets of files that threaten to topple over and bury the place.  Act Two is the bare stage of an opera house, onto which an Aida-like Egyptian sphinx is positioned for a later performance.  Act Three is a hotel room bare enough that it doesn’t upstage the denouement, where the focus should be on Emilia Marty and not on the decor.

The importance of the Czech conductor Jiri Belohlávek to the whole enterprise was evident at the curtain calls, when even Mattila deferred to him and insisted on his taking solo bows.  The orchestra handled Janácek is if it were the Czech Philharmonic, snarling when necessary, rhythmically alert, and precise.

The Met does Jenufa and Makropulos so well that it should take on The Cunning Little Vixen, the opera he wrote just before Makropulos that shares much of the same musical language.  It’s a natural for the Met’s adventures in HD broadcasts into theaters.