Smoking, nudity, immortality – Janacek opera The Makropulos Case, highlight of Hong Kong Arts Festival, has it all
A modern take on an eternal theme, this 1926 work – which has its Asian premiere in Hong Kong later this month – asks a profound question: what is the meaning of a life that never ends?
There is a warning in the Hong Kong Arts Festival brochure, on the page advertising its headline opera for this year. “This production contains onstage smoking and scenes of an adult nature,” it cautions. And it is right on both counts.
The National Theatre Brno’s vivid version of Czech composer Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case is certainly not the only opera with a post-coital cigarette moment. Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier sometimes has one, depending on the director, and Georges Bizet’s Carmen, a doomed love story set in a Spanish tobacco factory, is crying out for one or two. But without doubt The Makropulos Case has the only post-coital operatic cigarette smoked by a singer playing the part of a 300-year-old woman (though thanks to a fictional elixir, the years do not leave a mark).
“David said to him that it will be perfect that he should be really naked on stage, and he just said ‘No’.” But Sem slept on the idea and the next day, when they came to rehearse the third act, the curtains opened and there he was, sitting on the bed, naked. “And David Radok was really very happy.”
As the opera opens she is now Emilia Marty, she was once Elliann MacGregor… And it was when she was a child called Elina Makropulos that her father, happy to experiment on his own daughter, gave her a potion to drink, which he was testing before he gave it to the King.
It made her live 300 years. Although she had not been given a say in the matter of her own longevity, she used the time mostly profitably: to perfect her singing voice; to seduce some of the most powerful and attractive men in Europe; and to leave all sorts of trouble in her wake.