OPERA REVIEW : A Strange ‘Case’ for Janacek

The calendar read December, 1976, when Los Angeles last saw Leos Janacek’s weirdly fascinating and ultimately poignant “Vec Makropulos” (also known as “The Makropulos Case,” “The Makropulos Affair” and “The Makropulos Secret,” but most accurately translated as “The Makropulos Thing “). Fifteen years represent a long time in a city’s cultural history, though a mere moment in the life of the heroine of this fanciful opera, who happens to survive the rigors of mortal agony and intrigue for well over three centuries.

When last we encountered Emilia Marty (also known, among other names, as Ellian MacGregor and Elina Makropulos), she was portrayed by Maralin Niska as a flamboyant vamp in an indulgent multimedia production staged by Frank Corsaro for the New York City Opera. This was hardly an ideal representation of Janacek’s terse and subtle setting of the Karel Capek play, but it scored most of the basic points with decent sympathy.

Now, the Music Center Opera has brought the ancient but nearly ageless heroine back to Los Angeles in a lavish, fussily distorted production borrowed from the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Suddenly, we find ourselves yearning for the bad old days with Corsaro & Co.

“The Makropulos Case,” as presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday, is a prime exercise in Eurotrashy surrealism. Gunter Kramer’s cleverly devious staging scheme, reproduced here for better or worse by Matthias Remus, concentrates on flashy modernist images and decorative gimmicks. They make sense only if the viewer doesn’t happen to know, or care, about the composer’s intentions.

Janacek took great pains to create a credible setting for his philosophical exploration of the quest for eternal youth. He knew that the elements of science-fiction invention and gothic-horror mystery would be most compelling if presented within a cool, mundane milieu. If everything seemed real, he correctly reasoned, the infiltration of the unreal would be all the more disturbing.

Kramer, alas, believes none of that. He has enlisted a brilliant designer, Andreas Reinhardt, to set the opera--all of it--in a world of nightmarish distortions and exaggerations. There is nowhere to go from here but crazy.

When, in the final scene, the protagonist reveals her horrible secret and embraces her transfiguring destiny, the audience should experience first shock and then catharsis. But Kramer toys with the bizarre from the first bar, and thus allows no gradual development of suspicion, no sudden change of mood, no ultimate introduction of pathos. Under the cluttered circumstances, the crucial climax becomes no climax at all.

“The Makropulos Case,” in this director’s all-too-eager hands, becomes an opera about irrelevant props and caricatures. Emilia Marty, as portrayed by Karan Armstrong, is not the hypnotically erotic grande-dame described in the music and text. She is a clumsy, bald-pated grotesque, a shrill refugee from a very bad movie--part Nosferatu in drag and part Gloria Swanson over the top.

By blowing up the character and blurring the dramatic context, Kramer diminishes her stature. Heroic fury becomes mere petulance, a tragic outcry becomes just another silly whimper.

When we first see--and hardly hear--the diva, she is encased, for no apparent reason, in a 1921 Studebaker sedan. From here, she carries on a conversation with the attorney Kolenaty, who happens to inhabit a wheelchair, for no apparent reason, miles away. The libretto and the program synopsis, incidentally, tell us that the scene takes place in a law office.

Before the saga unwinds an hour and 50 minutes later (mercifully, without intermission), Kramer introduces a chorus of typewriting zombies (male), a stylized evocation of the Pyramids, a primitive light show and symbolic shadow play on the upstage scrim and, most significant, a spiral staircase that stops midair in mid-opera but rises to the stars--or at least the proscenium arch--in time for the not so-grand Guignol denouement.

As the curtain falls, we see a serpentine Emilia, clad in a banal white wedding gown encumbered with an endless train, literally groping her circuitous way onward and upward. It is, admittedly, a striking effect, and Armstrong executes it with determined athletic desperation. Still, it calls attention to itself for the wrong reasons.

The dramatic weaknesses of the production might have been more bearable if they had been counterbalanced with musical strengths. This, however, was a generally rough night for the Music Center Opera.

Armstrong’s once-lyric soprano sounded threadbare, even muted, on this occasion, and she reduced much of Norman Tucker’s English text to mush. Although her theatrical intensity remains undoubted, it was badly showcased here.

The supporting cast proved solid. Among the heroine’s would-be lovers, John Pringle sustained a degree of caustic dignity as Prus, Paul Frey projected heroic hysteria as Albert and Greg Fedderly conveyed conventional innocence as Janek. Sadly, Joseph Frank was encouraged to throw away the sweetly touching ardor of old Hauk-Sendorf in favor of crass comic relief (and a foolish evocation of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in extremis ).

Michael Gallup was gruffly imposing as Kolenaty. John Duykers conscientiously impersonated a human pendulum as his inquisitive clerk. Jennifer Smith exuded sensible optimism as the lyrical Kristina. Proletariat walk-on duties were efficiently dispatched by Marvellee Cariaga, Richard Bernstein and Jennifer Wallace.

Jiri Kout conducted a sometimes cautious, often ragged orchestra with informed competence, but did little to reinforce expansive articulation of the vocal lines. Those lines, it should be remembered, were predicated on the inflections of the Czech language. Much must be lost in translation.

The Music Center Opera opted for translation anyway, and then made the choice redundant by adding supertitles. Somehow, we had managed to follow the plot quite well back in 1976 without that distracting crutch.

Although the audience shrank as the short evening progressed, the cast and conductor were cheered when it came time for curtain calls. The stage director did not venture a bow.