The Makropulos Affair: Deutsche Oper Berlin

About the Event

Leos Janácek’s penultimate opera explores the human yearning for immortality. Director David Hermann and set designer Christof Hetzer bring Janácek's vision onto the stage of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

The famous singer Emilia Marty stirs up an inheritance dispute that has been going on for a century with her astonishing insider knowledge. She is not interested in establishing the truth but rather has an ulterior motive – she is determined to lay her hands on a document bearing the details of an ancient formula. 300 years previously she had been the subject of a scientific experiment that hugely extended the length of her life – and she now needs to take the potion again.

Leos Janácek shifted the focus of the work from an amusing dialectal study of the pros and cons of an artificially prolonged life to a personal, arresting criticism of the yawning emptiness and endless repetitiveness of such an existence.

Sung in Czech with English and German surtitles