The 337-year-old singer reveals her secret in Berlin

Chance has wanted that, in just a couple of weeks, new productions of two operas by Leoš Janáček have premiered in the two most important state opera houses in Germany, those of Munich and Berlin, which, under their very different appearance, They bear many similarities to each other.

They are not just any two works either, but rather the last stage pieces that the Czech composer saw performed in his lifetime, since

it premiered posthumously in Brno in 1930, two years after his death.

And it was precisely old age, the end of life, the themes that attracted the elderly Janáček in his own final stretch as a human being and as a creator, who began his career as an impersonal composer, almost inconsequential, and who was transfigured in a way rationally incomprehensible in one of the most profound and original musicians of the first third of the 20th century.

The Czech is also, without a shadow of a doubt, along with Richard Strauss and Alban Berg, and with the permission of Claude Debussy, the third member of the holy trinity of the great appearance on the stage of modern opera.

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On January 30, at the Bavarian Staatsoper, Barrie Kosky proposed a reading of

in which, from the moment the curtain rose, even before the music began, life and death were presented as the two necessary and complementary halves of the cycle of constant regeneration of nature.

In that beginning imagined by the Australian director, the little fox (played by a little girl) came out, smiling and carefree, from a grave in which someone had just been buried.

And, at the end of the opera, the ranger came to terms with his own mortality, by that very grave, as he watched the spectacle, repeated day after day, of sunset on the horizon before the next sunrise breaks through hours later, and of how generations harmoniously follow one another in the animal world.

Jan Martiník (Dr. Kolenatý), Marlis Petersen (Emilia Marty) and the firm's lawyers in the first act of the opera.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

In the last scene of

(perhaps a more adequate translation than the usual one of

, inherited from English, since it somewhat better reflects the ambiguity and polysemy of the original Czech word

), almost as if it were the ending of a

, we understand everything that until then had been something like a mysterious puzzle that was not easy to make sense of.

The protagonist of the opera is the same woman as all those who had been mentioned previously, who had in common names and surnames whose initials were always EM The one we see now calls herself Emilia Marty, but before she was Ellian MacGregor, Eugenia Montez , Ekaterina Myshkin, Elsa Müller or —the first of all— Elina Makropulos, born in 1575. Her father, a doctor at the court of Rudolf II (the last Habsburg emperor who kept his court in Prague), prepared a potion that would lengthen the life of the sovereign three hundred years.

Fearful that it would not work, he asked her to try it first on her own daughter, who became seriously ill shortly after ingesting it,

which dissuaded the emperor from following his example.

Later, however, the girl recovered, the potion did its job and, at 337 years old, she is the same woman we meet in Prague in 1922, when the play on which Janáček based his libretto was premiered. .

Its author, Karel Čapek, is a pioneer of science fiction and we owe him, for example, the word robot.

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Although alive, the soprano Emilia Marty is spiritually dead.

Or, as Janáček put it in a letter to Kamila Stösslová, his muse, his unattainable beloved, the fuse that set off a hidden and latent genius for more than half a century, the day after the composition of the opera began: “A three-hundred-year-old beauty, eternally young, but with her feelings stunted.

br!

Cold as ice!"

Makropulos is still young, beautiful, attractive to everyone, men and women alike, but her heart is atrophied and such a long, inhuman life ends up weighing her down like a slab.

However, she fears dying, and therefore she seeks the formula of that elixir of life,

preserved together with a will in the legal dispute that two families have been waging for decades and that is the framework that covers and provides characters for the rest of the plot.

However, when he finally gets his father's writing from him, he decides not to go through with it, not to drink the same potion again, because, like the ranger of

accepts death by understanding that it is precisely the one that gives meaning to our existence.

She has broken the natural cycle of life, the one that she so ecstatically admires the ranger, and that violation has brought her untold suffering.

"How happy you are!", She exclaims at the end, longing for the fate of the rest of the characters, with a limited and finite life, which allows one to believe in human beings, in love and in virtue.

And, again in connection with what Barrie Kosky showed in Munich: "To die or to live: it's all one thing, it's the same!"

Her search and her efforts have therefore not been fruitless, because what has happened previously is what makes her aware: it is her spiritual rebirth that opens the door to her physical death.

The double scenario imagined by Claus Guth in the transition from the first to the second act, with Marlis Petersen characterized as the protagonist of 'Madama Butterfly'.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Claus Guth is one of the great names in current stage direction.

In recent years we have admired at the Teatro Real, for example, his extraordinary

, his insightful

or his transgressive

(and his already classic montage of

).

Here he has just signed a show that is virtually perfect in its execution, although not so much in its conception.

Its only substantial error has perhaps consisted in giving primacy to Čapek's original conception (which characterized his work as a "comedy") rather than to the profound metamorphosis that it undoubtedly underwent at the hands of Janáček, who substantially pruned it and turned it into a a tragedy that appeals to all of us and that emphasizes longevity and mortality, the two issues that most concerned the composer, now in his seventies.

Marked forever by the early death of his two children, while imprisoned by the autumnal but irrepressible passion for the young Kamila, the Czech's last four operas are as many sides of a perfect square.

A Rural Drama (

), a philosophical fable (

), an ontological dystopia (

)

and a collective portrait of the most absolute abandonment (

) constitute the formidable and incomparable operatic legacy of the last Janáček.

That it is natural to establish connections between Elina Makropulos and Countess Madeleine de

of Strauss (two operas with a strong testamentary flavor) has been revealed, probably unintentionally, by Claus Guth by showing on stage, as Christof Loy did in Madrid, the symbolic "three ages" of the protagonist: a girl, a woman adult and an old woman.

But the restraint of his compatriot in showing this visually and conceptually very powerful triple image, turns this new Berlin production into an overused resource.

The girl is a girl dressed in the manner in which the infantas of the Habsburgs did and that we know well from the courtly portraits of our own Habsburgs (Rudolph II's mother was a daughter of Charles V).

In fact, before the music begins, as Barrie Kosky did in Munich, we see a wizened, almost hairless protagonist (impossible not to think of

by Ionesco), with hardly any strength to move, about to break, on a white, bare, dreamlike stage, which we will rediscover before each of the acts.

Bo Skovhus (Jaroslav Prus), Marlis Petersen (Emilia Marty) and Lara Mohns (Junge Marty) in the second act of 'The Makropulos Affair'.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Then, while the instrumental prelude plays, and just as the fanfare played by two trumpets, two horns and timpani representing the historical moment of Rudolf II is heard offstage, Guth makes appear for the first time on stage the little Elina, who shortly afterwards drinks the potion prepared by her father.

In this way, one of the keys to the final outcome is being unnecessarily anticipated, while at the same time we are being explained, more justifiably, what that fanfare means which, almost like the marches of Charles Ives, bursts in by surprise, completely disrupting and interrupting the previous course of the prelude.

It is music that sounds in the distance, outside the pit, as a symbol of the time jump, making Gurnemanz's phrase in

: "Time here becomes space."

Except for their first appearance, the instrumentalists played the fanfare from one of the proscenium boxes, always coinciding with the mentions of Rudolf II or Hieronymus or Elina Makropulos.

Only in his last intervention do the pit orchestra and the instrumentalists of the fanfare come together, also symbolically, because that is when, after Emilia Marty accepts her death, after desiring her even after glimpsing her first symptoms, past and present finally come together in an indistinguishable whole.

Apart from abusing the presence of the little Elina and the old Elina, Guth also misses the mark by having a series of dancers who do not stop moving rhythmically and comically in the three acts of the opera: in the law office, in the theater immediately after a performance and in a hotel room (

opera

, in which a telephone appears for the first time in the history of the genre, for example).

Sometimes they adopt contortionist poses inside an elevator, another unnecessary comical element that, saving all distances, is reminiscent of how Paco Azorín uses it in the staging of

by Manuel García that could be seen at the Fundación Juan March.

An elevator is a great discovery to make the characters enter and leave the stage, but all the humorous touches that Guth introduces are superfluous and detract from the successive dialogues that make up the transverse column of the opera, except, of course, of the two scenes carried out by a former suitor of the protagonist, now insane, Hauk-Šendorf, a role entrusted to an “operetta tenor” wisely introduced by Janáček in two crucial moments of the second and third act (in both they are sung in Spanish , since Emilia Marty called herself Eugenia Montez at the time) whose humor is reinforced by the fact that it serves as a counterpoint to the drama and mystery that permeate the rest of the plot.

Despite these reservations,

it's fair to say that this entire choreography of movement, devised by Sommer Ulrickson, is executed by ten dancers with virtually perfection.

But the addition of his own harvest of the German director subtracts instead of adding, distracts from what is truly important.

An elevator acts as a probably unnecessary comedic element in the dramatic course of action of 'The Makropulos Affair'.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

In what is the original drama, however, Guth always hits the mark, with the only blur of presenting Albert Gregor as an excessively banal character, almost like a big boy, also dressed unnecessarily grotesquely or stiffly.

The decision to move the various sets (by Étienne Pluss) from left to right, or vice versa, at the beginning of each act, to allow us to witness the process of metamorphosis of Emilia Marty, who goes from being a dispossession of time to becoming that woman cold and contemptuous, it is a splendid resource to show, without words, that reality is not what it seems.

In the second act, we see her characterized as Cio-Cio-San (in another dispensable joke, a double of hers appears bloodied in the elevator with the dagger stuck in her stomach) after a performance of

and it is only at the end, just after the last symbolic appearance of the fanfare, when she undresses for the last time to recover on the main stage, in the real world, the aged and decrepit appearance she had in the dream: the union of past and present in music finally corresponds to the uniqueness of a hitherto dual character.

The soprano Marlis Petersen embodies the protagonist Emilia Marty, on whose shoulders falls —musically and scenically— much of the weight of the performance.

As an exceptional interpreter of Alban Berg's Lulu, she knows very well how to have all the men to the retort.

As in the Austrian opera, one of them commits suicide for her (Janek), which leaves him completely indifferent.

Petersen very well conveys his arrogance, his detachment from everything and everyone, his attractiveness, even the empathy that Janáček wants him to awaken in us, while, in the final outcome, he knows how to make believable the unbearable weight that has made him have to endure such longevity: all feelings are annihilated as a result of that long-deferred ending and the accumulation of deaths that he has witnessed.

in constant metamorphosis and always pending to engage like a glove with the natural accents of language.

His greatest brilliance comes, how could it be otherwise, in the great final scene, where, as he had done with the ranger in

, the composer reserves a long solo intervention for him, a moment as grandiose and irresistible now as then.

It cannot be by chance that both passages are written in the form of slow and devastatingly melancholy waltzes.

Emilia Marty, drunk and with a bottle in her hand, despising the rest of the characters, and their victims, before her final collapse.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Simon Rattle is a long-time supporter of Leoš Janáček's cause.

Since his recording of the

and the

in 1981 with his Birmingham orchestra, he has not ceased to strongly defend his music.

With

he closes the cycle of the last four great Czech operas musically directed by the British director at the Berlin Staatsoper.

His familiarity with Janáček's language, full of sudden interjections, of irregular groups (from doubles to septuplets) to avoid any metrical regularity, of unusual time signatures (3/16, 7/16, 1/2), of small repeated cells, from the symbolic use of the

(almost always inaudible but present incarnation of his beloved Kamila), with a unique instrumental writing (nobody has exploited the high register of violins like him), is absolute.

But he does not open the jar of essences until the last scene, the musical, dramatic and philosophical climax of the opera.

Until then, everything is very well directed and is admirably played by the fabulous Staatskapelle of Berlin, but at various moments it lacks mordant, tension, that characteristic angularity of the Czech's writing, that only apparently uneven twinning between the constant dialogues of the characters and the instrumental counterpoint of the orchestra.

Of the three final acts, which one was better and more effectively written, only the third one had the necessary punch.

In the other two - the unusual orchestral epilogue of the first,

The rest of the cast, very choral, works very well, except, again, Albert Gregor's little mole, which Ludovit Ludha does not know how to endow with neither vocal nor scenic entity.

Jan Martiník's Dr. Kolenatý is very convincing;

solid, but not exceptional, Baron Prus of the very experienced Bo Skovhus;

Vitek by Peter Hoare and Krista (his daughter by him) by Natalia Skrycka are magnificent.

But those who hit the bull's-eye the most were Jan Zežek, who brings to life a Hauk-Šendorf with just the right amount of humor and vocal decadence, and the young Anna Kissjudit, who in her fleeting appearance as the hotel maid in the third act showed signs of possessing an instrument of extraordinary quality.

The final offstage interventions of the choir were assumed on stage by the male characters.

The final applause after the premiere was long and unanimous, without a single hint of dissent: everyone took their prize, with Rattle, Guth and, of course, Petersen most justly acclaimed.

Wolfgang Schäuble, the once all-powerful German Finance Minister, and Barrie Kosky could be seen in the audience, perhaps mentally drawing some parallels with his production of

bitch

Emilia Marty (Marlis Petersen), already collapsed, near her final revelation in the last scene of the opera.MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

On the Sunday morning of the premiere, at the Staatsoper's Apollosaal, the second of two chamber concerts with works mostly by Leoš Janáček scheduled for the weekend could be heard.

It was almost hard to believe that the composer of the two works that sounded at the beginning and at the end of the matinee was the same person: the youthful

and the

, a contemporary of

.

One is a predictable composer, nothing original, even boring.

The other is a master of conciseness, unorthodox, surprising, profound.

Between one work and another, members of the Staatskapelle performed two early pieces, also largely irrelevant, for violin and piano (

and

) and

Antonín Dvořák's

But the final goal was what explained and justified all of the above, the

, whose solo part was admirably played by Giuseppe Mentuccia, very well supported by three string instrumentalists and as many wind instruments, among whom the very young —and very sure— — Sulamith Seidenberg, who would play again in the afternoon in the pit.

The most extraordinary thing about the double session in the same day was the verification of how experience, inspiration, age, love, even the proximity of death, can completely transform a human being to the point that the composer The mediocre Janáček was for several decades ended up becoming, almost

, a brilliant creator, one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century.

He too, like Emilia Marty, needed death to give meaning and greatness to his life.

And, paradoxically, to give him—to him yes—immortality.

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