Janacek's Makropulos and the Case of the Silent Diva

Abstract

Grotesquely illuminated by a green light, Emilia Marty, the central character of Janáček's Věc Makropulos (1926), makes her final entrance on stage. In the passing of just a few minutes, Marty—until this point an arresting, ageless beauty—has diminished to a shadow. Born in 1585, she was given an elixir of immortality at the age of sixteen; from that time, in the first years of the seventeenth century, she has lived an inhuman life as an undying singer. Now, however, the suppressed aging of her artificially sustained three hundred years catches up with her in a moment: when she creeps on stage for her last scene, she is physically ruined and near death. Marty's decline has little of the graphic horror unveiled in the transformation of Dorian Gray's portrait, yet the exposure of an unnatural force is strikingly similar. As it was in The Excursions of Mr. Brouček (1920), green light was again Janáček's recourse when something more than music was needed to suggest rupture and the penetration of the supernatural into the “real” world on stage.