Review: The Makropulos Case – cast, score and stage shine
Annalena Persson’s performance as opera singer Emilia a standout in a successful undertaking in which staging and score flowed seamlessly and the cast acted and sang with dramatic conviction
Emilia Marty is the kind of operatic role most sopranos would kill for. She is, first of all, supposed to be a celebrated opera singer. Second, she entrances practically any man who comes her way. And oh yes, she’s more than 300 years old.
All that nearly makes up for not having a decent aria.
The central figure in Leos Janacek’s 1925 opera The Makropulos Case, which received its belated Asian premiere last week in a highly effective 2015 production by the National Theatre Brno, shares several characteristics with Tosca, her fellow diva in the operatic repertory, but having memorable tunes is not among them.
Born Elina Makropulos, the daughter of a 16th-century imperial court doctor, Emilia was forced to test her father’s elixir of immortality by a suspicious monarch. It worked, but it also meant that she had to change her name and profile every few decades to avoid detection.
Since becoming “Emilia”, she finds the elixir is wearing off and needs to track down the formula, which she once gave to a long-dead husband; it remains sealed with his papers in a protracted probate case.