Makropulos Case

From August 2012

23 years on from attending my first opera - also an Opera North production - I'm still no further forward to answering the question "Do I like it?". On balance I probably do but it can be quite hard work.

Like most operas The Makropulos Case by Czech composer Leoš Janáček suffers from having a totally incomprehensible plot. This one is about a 369 year old opera singer with whom every male member of the cast falls in love but even with the libretto translated into English it was hard to ascertain what was actually going on. It certainly lived up to its description in the Festival programme as "a mystery".

But that's all by the by and only to be expected of any operatic performance. My only real complaint was that there were no banging tunes for Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg to get stuck into. The lady I got speaking to at half time described the music as "a bit screechy" and she certainly seemed to know her stuff. I managed to string the conversation out for fully 5 minutes and she was most impressed when I compared Janáček's effort with Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges but the truth is it was (i) the only other opera I could remember and (ii) I hadn't a clue what was going on in that one either. 

The Makropulos Case, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, run ended