Janáček’s Makropulos Case is strongly associated both with the Coliseum and with Sir Charles Mackerras. It’s first UK performance was given at Sadler’s Wells (ENO’s former incarnation) in 1964 conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. Other productions followed, and in 2006 Christopher Alden directed a new production also conducted by Mackerras. It has now been revived, this time dedicated to the memory of Sir Charles whose spirit in invoked at the beginning by an enormous photograph of him projected onto the curtain before the performance begins. This is just because Mackerras not only did as much as anyone else to revive interest in Janáček’s operas, as well as masterminding the restoration of Janáček’s original scores.
      Unlike previous productions which tended to be set before World War One slightly earlier than the play and Emilia Marty’s age imply. In these an opulent decadence prevailed, and Emilia Marty was a much ‘grander dame’ than in Alden’s production. Somehow there seemed a link between the sorrowing Marschallin (Hofmannsthal/Strauss) musing on her impending declining and Emilia Marty reflecting on her desiccated soul and ambivalence between life and death. Visually and emotionally Alden has broken that link, and Janáček’s opera, as Capek’s play, is set firmly in the 1920s. The most striking consequence of this is to make Emilia Marty seem more like a femme fatale, a vamp, rather than declining super-star. In the end one’s feeling is she gets what she deserves, rather than being a person more sinned against through being the unwilling victim of a scientific experiment than sinning. The world of the opera is now more declined than declining.
     Alden’s bleaker direction of the opera is reinforced not only in the way Emilia Marty is portrayed, now superbly by Amanda Roocroft who rightly elicited cheers from the audience at the first night, but by the evocative ‘art nouveau’ sets of Charles Edwards. It will be bard to forget the ominous presence of Marty’s past lovers staring at what is happening through the glass doors which occasionally open to let them flood into the room as her latest manipulations and conquests are taking place. Even the rather crudely stagy throwing in from behind curtains of a cloak and the body of Prus’s son Janek. The third act in particular, as it should be, was the most highly emotionally charged, and in Alden’s production that is highly charged indeed.
      The Makropulos Case is a very condensed opera containing only about one and half hour’s music. In Sir Richard Armstrong’s the performance lasted about two hours with a half-hour interval. To some his performance seemed even tighter and faster than Sir Charles’s when he conducted it in 2006. The advantage of this is a terrific dramatic pace, the disadvantage is sometimes the fleeting changes of style that characterize the situations and the personae can seem too underplayed to have their full impact. However, Sir Richard’s performance seems completely in accordance with Alden’s dark view of the work.
     The star of this production was Amanda Roocroft who was both dramatically and musically outstanding. She managed brilliantly the transition from the scheming diva anxious to lay her hands on the life-prolonging formula to the broken woman who can no longer find a reason to extend her life again. So successful was this that it made the glorious final act almost unbearable in its objectified poignancy. Before I had felt sympathy for Emilia, but in this chilling production impressions were more ambivalent which is a testimony to its all-embracing vision shared, it seemed, by Alden, Armstrong and the performers. Roocroft’s steady revelation of her identity to her suitors and onlookers was magnificently paced, and her gentle subsidence into pitiable decline was gloriously portrayed.
      Janáček was a master of brief characterization through chameleon-like musical changes. As powerful as Roocroft in their less extended way were the licentious heavyweight Baron Jaroslav Prus and his tongue-tied, ill- fate son, Janek, sung respetively and superbly by Ashley Holland and Christopher Turner. Even the eager Hauk-_endorf sung by Ryland Davies was a vignette to treasure as he prepares to elope with Emilia in an earlier guise. Much the same could be said of an even smaller part, the Cleaning Woman, equally portrayed to perfection by Morag Boyle. Andrew Shore, Peter Hoare, Alasdair Elliot and Laura Mitchell each rose to the production in their satellite subjections to the scheming Emilia.
     This is a production to treasure and its revival under this tighter musical reins of Richard Armstrong make a lasting and moving impression. It’s another in the growing list of ENO productions not to be missed.
Roderick Swanston