"If someone doesn't like opera, take them to Janáček," said conductor Simon Rattle, and he's right. Janáček's operas are each unique, running at the speed of thought and theatrical in the best sense of the word. For example, the Makropulos Affair, with its almost detective plot, is definitely not a typical operatic subject, but in Janáček's performance, a century-old legal dispute over inheritance quickly turns into a captivating drama about the search for the meaning of human life. It is an even greater experience when director Claus Guth's stage view is added, where realistic images of a law firm and a theater backstage alternate in transformations with even surreal moments of isolation of the main character. The German director Claus Guth is one of the world's leading creators and is best known for his productions of works by Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner and Handel. His first encounter with Czech opera was a production of Bohuslav Martinů's Julietta in 2016, but it was not until six years later that his first Janáček came, an excellent production of Její pastorkyně for Covent Garden. The Makropulos thing was created for Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden and is the first time that this great opera company will be presented at the festival.
The Makropulos Affair is, in many ways, a work without parallel in the world of opera. It is not surprising that the author of the literary work, Karel Čapek, was initially somewhat skeptical of Janáček's intention to turn his play into an opera. Set in a legal setting, full of dialogue and convoluted plot, where characters talk on the phone and where tracing family ties is almost a task for a genealogist, it was not entirely typical of opera even at the beginning of the 20th century. But Janáček, who had already dealt with life and its endless cycle in The Adventures of the Vixen Vixen, was very interested in what the Makropulos Case hides under its legal-detective plot – the question of whether immortality can bring happiness to people, or whether human life is filled by the inevitability of the end. Janáček himself later recalled: "I was caught by it. You know, the terrible, the emotional thing of a person who will never have an end. Unfortunate. He doesn't want anything, he doesn't expect anything. There must be something to it. The third act, that's what I'm basing myself on: the descent, the precipice! That's what I felt, that's what I wanted." Čapek finally agreed to the music, and Janáček set about editing and shortening the text of the play. He devoted the next two years to the composition, and Janáček's correspondence maps his preoccupation with and sympathy for the main character of the opera: "Beauty 300 years old - and eternally young - but only a burnt-out feeling! Brrr! Cold as ice! But I'll make her warmer so that people can sympathize with her. I'm still going to fall in love with her." The pre-Christmas premiere in 1928 in the Brno theater aroused unprecedented interest and the theater was completely sold out! The success was huge. Janáček recalled: "The cold one had an unsuspected success! The cold went through everyone's body. It is said to be my greatest work!'
Patricia Částková
