Opera Scotland

Makropulos Affair 2025Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Makropulos Affair

This is a fascinating opera, and it is good to see Scottish Opera tackling it again, several decades since its first production.  Like that 1981 staging (revived in 1993), this is a co-production with Welsh National Opera, and it has been very well received in Cardiff. It was nominated for a Southbank Sky Arts Award in 2022.

It opens in a solicitor's office, where a long-running legal case (nothing to do with Makropulos) is being discussed, as it drags on with no sign of a solution - almost a Dickensian feel to it.  Proceedings are interrupted by the arrival of Emilia Marty, a strange, beautiful woman, a successful opera star, rude and rather self-centred. She surprises the other characters by talking about some early, now dead, participants in the case of Gregor versus Prus as though she actually knew them.

She is hunting for a document, a chemical formula for an elixir of life concocted by her father, a Greek alchemist - over three hundred years previously.  The consequences lead via some darkly comic scenes to one of the most gripping of all operatic finales. Emilia, known previously by various names, starting as Elina Makropulos (and including Elian MacGregor) has to decide if she wishes to continue an increasingly empty life.

This staging by Olivia Fuchs, has a largely familiar cast of excellent singing actors.  The conductor is Martyn Brabbins.  Until recently music director with ENO, he is most familiar in Scotland for his many concerts and recordings with the BBC in Glasgow.  He now makes his debut with Scottish Opera.