Disrupt the cycle of life at your peril. Two operas written a century apart, performed last week, shout this imperative. Their perspectives appear at once contrary and unanimous. Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair (1926), staged by Scottish Opera, examines the human instinct to outwit death, via the unlikely tale of a 337-year old woman in thrall to an immortal elixir. A world premiere by Jonathan Dove, Uprising, the latest in Glyndebourne’s community opera series, addresses the survival of the planet itself, threatened by humanity’s habit of looking away.
The chance to encounter Janáček’s penultimate opera, last seen in Scotland in 2012, needs to be grabbed. Slow to be appreciated, it remains a relative rarity compared with Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová. This co-production with Welsh National Opera – new in Cardiff in 2022 – is as good as it gets, with a characterful cast superbly directed by Olivia Fuchs, and conducted with perception and fervour by Martyn Brabbins. The Irish soprano Orla Boylan sings the mysteriously ageless Emilia Marty, in fact born Elina Makropulos more than three centuries earlier. Now on her umpteenth reinvention and name change, Marty is both an alluring grande dame and a figure of pity, especially here in Boylan’s exemplary reading. Makropulos, with an incomprehensible legal wrangle at its heart, can be thought chilly. These forces, with impassioned playing by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, prove otherwise.
