Indestructible Janacek

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Janacek’s The Makropulos Case remains a bewildering work, as in fact almost all his operas after Jenufa, and with the exception of The Cunning Little Vixen, are. Capek’s play from which Janacek made his libretto is called a comedy, but the opera, though it has a few jokes, is mainly a painful and even tragic-seeming work, with an enormous, perhaps unique, amount of the paralysingly prosaic. The plot is grotesquely and designedly complicated, all its elaborations being cut through by the shattering central donnée, that its heroine is 337 years old, still the most glamorous and adored opera diva in the world. We are kept outside her for so long in order that we may be all the more shattered when we move inside her in Act III and find that she is bored with everything, that the only thing she wants is death, which she brings upon herself by destroying the formula which has constantly renewed her youth.