The Makropulos Affair by Janáček, De (2024/2024), Dirigit per Claus Guth, Director musical Robert Jindra, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany

Documentation of an absurdly complex inheritance dispute, crime play, meta-opera with a singer playing a singer, treatise on the sense and nonsense of human immortality - all of this is hidden behind "the Makropulos matter/case". Opera diva Emilia Marty uses her inexplicable knowledge of details to stir up the participants in an inheritance case that has been simmering for a hundred years and ruthlessly exploits the fact that all the men are infatuated with her for her mysterious purposes. What no one suspects: Under the mountains of paper from the trial is a mysterious, old recipe for a potion that can prolong life by 300 years, which Marty has already taken once and which she is now chasing in order to prolong her life once again. But after she has literally walked over dead bodies and holds the document in her hands, she understands the price of eternal life... Janáček's penultimate opera is his strangest, and not just because of its surprising plot. The main theme of all his operas, love, appears here ex negativo in its absence. Janáček transforms the distancing coolness and irony of Karel Čapek's play into a veritable tragedy that generates pity for his aloof, bored and emotionally impoverished main character.