Monster of Ice and Ennui

By Robert T. Jones

"Poor 300-year-old beauty! People took her for a thief, for a liar, for a heartless animal. They called her beast, slut, they wanted to strangle her. And her fault? That she was doomed to live too long a time. I was sorry for her."

--Leos Janacek (1925)

Most operas concentrate on the obvious: love (usually thwarted), murder, political connivery. Not those by Czech Composer Janacek (TIME, Dec. 5, 1969), who had a taste for fantasy and the mysterious. Moreover, in The Makopoulos Affair, completed in 1925 three years before his death, the composer created an opera that offers no arias, no immediately whistleable tunes but is nonetheless marked by a considerable genius. Last week, when the New York City Opera produced it, a sellout audience responded with a twelve-minute ovation, a generous part of it in praise of the ingenuity used by Director Frank Corsaro and Mixed-Media Experts Gardner Compton and Emile Ardolino.

The real concern of The Makropoulos Affair is time. Adapted from a play by Czech Dramatist Karel Capek, it deals with a 342-year-old woman who calls herself Emilia Marty. She has not aged much physically, but she has seen, heard and had just about everything and everybody. Longevity has drained away all feeling and left only a beautiful monster of ice and ennui. "There is no joy in goodness, no joy in evil," she says. "When you know that, your soul dies within you." Nevertheless, she is still human enough to be terrified of death, and the opera observes her ruthlessly searching and seducing her way toward a document that holds the prescription for another 300 years of life. Finding it, she also finds the unexpected strength to refuse it and die nobly. Through Janacek's music, the bitch goddess becomes an archangel.

The opera is remarkably powerful. All melody pared to its bare essentials, Janacek'a music illuminates Capek's bizarre tale with a cold, exciting glare. Characters declaim in energetic syllables that leap from one end of their voices to the other, too tense to lapse into song. The orchestra vibrates with intense color and rhythm, microscopically reflective of each dramatic subtlety.

In Corsaro's production, slides and movie films projected upon shifting, oddly shaped screens clarify the former identities of the heroine. Thus handled, Janacek's propulsive overture is accompanied by a surrealistic visual nightmare of running figures, time travel, characters that melt from one person to another, and a Gestapo-like chauffeur who symbolizes death. During the opera's action, the films subside into ghostly suggestions of thoughts and memories, some of them unabashed recollections of the heroine's erotic past. When the secret-of-life document is burned, the entire stage ignites into a holocaust of blazing paper, billowing fog and dissolving people.

Janacek's work depends upon a great singing actress for its ultimate effect. Emilia Marty should be beautiful, venomous, sinister and finally tragic. Her music is strident and etched in acid but when Marty accepts death, it soars toward the sublime. California-born Soprano Maralin Niska, singing her twelfth role with the New York City Opera, was almost up to her demanding role. Niska's voice is bright and well cultivated rather than monumental, but at her best she left no doubt what Janacek had in mind. She is a superb actress who lacks only a measure of grandeur to suggest a woman doddering under the weight of three centuries of Weltschrnerz. But then, by the opera's standards, she is still three centuries or so too young for the part.

Robert T. Jones

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.