Karita Mattila in Janacek’s ‘Makropulos Case’ at the Met




As much as Puccini’s “Tosca,” Verdi’s “Aida” or Berg’s “Lulu,” Janacek’s 1926 opera, “The Makropulos Case,” comes across as the stunning masterpiece it is only if a production has a soprano who can inhabit the lead role. Here that character is Emilia Marty, the mysterious prima donna at the center of this suspenseful thriller, set in Prague in 1922. On Friday night Karita Mattila sang Marty when the Metropolitan Opera brought back the sleekly modern and inspired 1996 production by Elijah Moshinsky, last seen in 2001.


Before we meet her we learn that Marty is a sensational opera singer, mesmerizing on and off the stage. And at her first appearance, in which Marty shows up unexpectedly in the office of Dr. Kolenaty, a lawyer, Ms. Mattila was electrifying before she had sung a note. The lighting captured the luster of her blond hair, pale blue dress and knowing smile. This is what you call charisma. Ms. Mattila’s voice may have lost some of the bloom, security and power that made her the Salome of our time at the Met in 2004 (repeated in 2008). But her singing was commanding: cool and cagey one moment, intense and chilling the next.


Janacek adapted the libretto from a play by Karel Capek that he saw shortly after its premiere in 1922. In the background is a lawsuit that has dragged on for nearly a century, Gregor v. Prus, a dispute over the estate of Baron Prus, who died in 1827. Marty has taken an odd interest in the case and seems inexplicably familiar with long-dead parties to the suit.


The truth is that she knew them all. She was born Elina Makropulos in Crete more than 300 years ago. Her father, physician to Emperor Rudolf II, developed an experimental life potion for his monarch but the emperor made him test it on his daughter, 15 at the time. Over the centuries Marty has invented and retired many personas. We meet her when she needs another dose to go on. But the document with the formula has become entangled in the paper trail of Gregor v. Prus.


Other sopranos have highlighted the character’s cynicism and desperation. The great Anja Silja gave a searing performance in a production from the Glyndebourne Festival that came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2001. Ms. Mattila conveyed Marty’s elusiveness and glamour, which go hand in hand. Men, including Gregor, here the ardent and effective if sometimes vocally forced tenor Richard Leech, lose all reason in their desire for her.


At first I thought that Ms. Mattila was going for too much vampish glamour in the role. But slowly and subtly she brought out the diva’s emptiness and bitterness as Marty laughs at the foolish people around her who take attachments seriously. Ms. Mattila now adds this role to her other memorable portrayals of Janacek heroines over the last decade at the Met: the title roles of “Jenufa” and “Katya Kabanova.” The original Capek play is full of chatty conversation and legalistic bickering. But this seemingly unoperatic quality was exactly what drew Janacek to it. In the last period of his life Janacek (who died in 1928 at 74), fashioned his own way to write path-breaking operas. Though his harmonic language has pungently modern elements, the true modernism comes from the way the vocal lines closely imitate the rhythms and contours of the Czech words. And for whole stretches of the score the vocal lines hover in their own dramatic realm above the orchestral music, a hotbed of shifting harmonies and fractured phrases.


The performance that the Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek drew from the Met orchestra lacked incisive attack but vividly captured the sweep, colorings and character of the music. There were vocally strong and dramatically rounded performances from the dynamic tenor Alan Oke as the law clerk Vitek; the bright-voiced soprano Emalie Savoy, in her Met debut, as Vitek’s daughter, Kristina (an aspiring opera singer who adores Marty); the robust baritone Tom Fox as the lawyer Kolenaty; the sturdy bass-baritone Johan Reuter (in another Met debut) as the current Baron Prus; and the appealing young tenor Matthew Plenk as Prus’s son, Janek, who adores Kristina but falls fatally under Marty’s spell.


In the tour-de-force final scene, in which Marty, confronted by lawyers and officials, tells the whole truth, Ms. Mattila’s singing was a spellbinding mix of blazing fervor and ethereal beauty. Finally fed up with life and blithely ready for death, Marty offers the formula to anyone who wants it. They all recoil. The young Kristina burns it, as what looks like a distant billboard with Marty’s image goes up in flames.