One Last Opera

Chapter 6 revolved around From the House of the Dead. That is JanáĆek's final opera, and it is tempting (and logical) to end the book there. One JanáĆek opera of the 1920s, though, has been conspicuously slighted in the previous chapters, and that is Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case, first performed in 1926). This is not only a lacuna in the book but an embarrassing oversight for me, as it is my favorite JanáĆek opera. Back in my graduate school days, I was inspired by the productions at the Metropolitan Opera starring Jessye Norman and Catherine Malfitano, and I had originally intended to write my entire dissertation on The Makropulos Case. I was interested in the ways the history of the Habsburg empire, and of opera itself, was inscribed into the Makropulos story. The opera is based on a Karel Ćapek play, also entitled Věc Makropulos, about a singer born in 1585—not long after the establishment of the Habsburg monarchy in 1526 and just before the first academic experiments with opera at the end of the sixteenth century—who lived through the entire subsequent histories of both institutions. I foundered very quickly, though, on an inability to meaningfully include JanáĆek's music in my historical musings (I have Carl Schorske to thank for gently and tactfully pointing out that I was hopelessly stuck) and ended up writing a dissertation that discussed a number of JanáĆek's operas but barely mentioned Makropulos. I would like to conclude now with an epilogue about The Makropulos Case, both to pay off that promissory note left over from graduate school and to provide an example of the type of critical reading I am hoping to encourage. If the previous chapters have been about problematizing JanáĆek's relationships with, among other things, speech melodies, Russian culture, and Czech nationalism, this one will attempt to take a particularly moving moment in a JanáĆek opera and explain the intersection between its musical and dramatic languages without recourse to any of those elements.

Makropulos as a Czech Opera of the 1920s

The Makropulos Case has had passionate advocates ever since its 1926 premiere.