Vĕc Makropulos

It’s a normal, busy weekday in the offices of a Prague law firm, and the staff are buzzing. After decades of wrangling, it looks as if the century-old lawsuit of Gregor vs Prus is about to reach a resolution. Meanwhile the greatest diva of the age, Emilia Marty, is performing at the opera, and now she too wishes to speak to the lawyers. Why is a famous opera singer so interested in a dusty old legal dispute, and how can she know as much about it as appears to be the case? This is Prague, in the thoroughly modern year 1922, and the impossible doesn’t happen any more. Or does it? Perhaps only Janáček could have seen the musical potential in the play Věc Makropulos by the Czech science fiction writer Karel Čapek. It defies genre: a fierce, brilliant cocktail of realist satire, romantic melodrama and magical realism. But in 1925 Janáček transformed it into an opera like no other—driven by passionate energy, crackling wit and a yearning, glowing sense of lost worlds and vanished lives. At its centre is the proud, dazzling figure of Emilia Marty, whose frozen heart finally thaws in one of the most unexpected and extraordinary endings in all opera.