E M and 'The Macropoulos Secret'

At the second interval, a woman asked me “Are you enjoying the opera?”

I said, “Yes”.

She said, “I’m not”. We were near the cloak room for the concert hall. To be more precise, I was on my way back from the Gents and she from the Ladies, and now I could see her husband hovering nearby. Clearly she was getting ready to go home.

She said, “I hate it. It’s just like a play with music.”

I said “Well, that’s just the parlando style. I know, it seems extravagant. But it’s only short. Only another 20-25 minutes. If it’s only a play with music, you might as well stay to see how the play ends.” I could have said that the music opens up a bit in the last act, as you would expect, but we’d only just met.

She did stay. In a way she was right about the play with music bit: if you’ve come to the opera thinking Verdi and tunes, you could well be disappointed by The Macropoulos Secret, which is made up of little phrases and entirely dramatic music to a greater extent than any of the other Janacek operas I know. It is fairly spare with the long lyrical lines. (This another reason why the dramatic obstacle of the Anke/Cheryl situation was such a blow - in a different kind of opera it would be easier to overcome.)

It is in the last act that we learn the secret of the title as translated by Opera Australia. Emilia Marty, the circa-1922 opera singer, is in fact Elina Macropoulos, born 1585, daughter of the physician to the Emperor Rudolf and obliged to take an elixir of eternal (or at least very long) life as a guinea pig for him when aged only 16. Since then, she has assumed a number of other identities - you can’t live 300 years without changing your name - always with the initials “E M”.

At such length, life is meaningless and lonely. She cannot harbour the hopes of change for the better that people with more natural life-spans perhaps naïvely can. She has become a kind of cross between Wagner’s Dutchman and Wedekind/Berg’s Lulu. She does not really even care for her children (she has had so many over the years). A little inconsistently, there was one man whom she loved and to whom she had entrusted her father’s recipe for the potion. It was to retrieve this that she first entered the action of the opera, but now she relinquishes it. Will anyone take it from her?

Accompanying these revelations in the last act were other more dramatic developments and (as I have said already) a heightening of the musical register. I hope my interval interlocutrix thought it worth staying for.

But wasn’t it prescient of D to be thinking of the very thing that the opera, at least in a way, turned out to be about? We rushed to the carpark to avoid the terrible exit traffic jam. We were out in a jiffy and home by 10.15.