Sir Charles Mackerras, a world authority on the great Czech composer Janáček, conducts this poignant drama of love and immortality in the production by Christopher Alden for ENO in 2006. Set in a dream-like vision of 1920s Prague, the opera centres on the enigmatic and sexually irresistible Emilia Marty, an opera diva who after taking an elixir has lived for more than 300 years. As she approaches the end of the term for which the elixir spared her death, the opera powerfully explores Emilia’s dilemma of whether to prolong her life a further 300 years.

 

The soprano Cheryl Barker here made her role debut as the mesmerising Emilia Marty, and American tenor Robert Brubaker appears as Albert Gregor, a role he has sung at The Metropolitan Opera, New York, to great acclaim.

 

Janáček was a late developer, coming to creative maturity in his fifties, and driven by a fierce nationalism, a passionate obsession with a younger woman and a preoccupation with what he described as ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’. In the ten years which witnessed the birth of almost all of his musical masterpieces, Janáček took large artistic risks. In particular, in his three last operas – The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Case and From the House of the Dead – he set himself challenges which were not merely difficult but well-nigh insane – and surmounted them triumphantly. These three music dramas are among the most humane and moving musical documents of the twentieth century.

 

None of them is stranger or more affecting than the opera which is known in the English-speaking world as The Makropulos Case. The music is some of the most transcendent in all of twentieth-century opera.

 

Reviews from the performance:
"So good it hurts… some of the greatest operatic music ever… Entrust Janáček’s case to one of his greatest champions, Sir Charles Mackerras, and you have one of the most memorable evenings at English National Opera… Cheryl Barker is outstanding as Emilia Marty… Uprecedented eloquence from ENO’s fine house orchestra." The Observer

 

This is the first recording in English, in a live recording from the Coliseum.