Organization

Singer

Soprano

Angela Denoke

Emilia Marty

Tenor

Brandon Jovanovich

Albert Gregor

Peter Hoare

Vitek

Jurgita Adamonytė

Kristina

Baritone

Johan Reuter

Jaroslav Prus

Aleš Briscein

Janek

Bass-baritone

Jochen Schmeckenbecher

Dr Kolenaty

Contralto

Linda Ormiston

Cleaner

Hotel housekeeper

Ryland Davies

Count Hauk-Sendorf

Conductor

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Stage director

Christoph Marthaler

Costume designer

Anna Viebrock

Set designer

Salzburger Festspiele

Orchestra

Wiener Philharmoniker

Czech

Věc Makropulos -  (The Makropulos Affair)

Salzburg

Austria

Großes Festspielhaus

The celebrated singer Emilia Marty has a secret: her real name is Elina Makropulos and she is over three hundred years old. Her father had once brought about the long lifespan with an experiment. But now the life, beauty and youth of the singer must be prolonged again, and for this she urgently needs her father's secret formula...

The plot is based on the play of the same name by the renowned Czech poet Karel Čapek. Janáček wrote the text himself and took it verbatim in an abbreviated form.

The story about immortality fascinated him: "It grabbed me," he wrote, "the terrible, the human-emotional that will never end." But Janáček felt pity for the three-hundred-year-old beauty who must live so long: An invisible choir comments on Emilia Marty's death with the words "We are so happy" - happy because we are allowed to live, love and die.

Janáček worked on his opera for two years, setting the dialogues to music with his typical care in terms of intonation and atmosphere. He dispensed with arias and composed in a recitative style that makes the complicated content understandable.

With its utopian plot, "The Makropulos Case" is unique in operatic history. The premiere in Brno in 1926 was a great success for the seventy-one-year-old Janáček. The work took a long time to establish itself on the international opera scene and is still considered an exciting insider tip, a model of music theater that strays from the usual path and "grabs" the audience with new means.

"...the great Janáček success completes a triad of premieres ... the summer of 2011 will be remembered for a long time" (Salzburger Nachrichten).

Photos