Janáček - The Makropoulos Case (Věc Makropulos), at the Lille Opera

Opéra de Lille, France, Monday February 16 2026

Conductor: Dennis Russell Davies. Production: Kornél Mundruczó, reprised by Marcos Darbyshire. Sets and Costumes: Monika Pormale. Lighting: Felice Ross. Emilia Marty: Aušrinė Stundytė. Albert Gregor: Denys Pivnitskyi. Jaroslav Prus: Robin Adams. Dr Kolenatý: Jan Hnyk. Vítek: Paul Kaufmann. Krista: Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur. Janek: Florian Panzieri. Hauk-Schendorf: Jean-Paul Fouchécourt. Maid: Mathilde Legrand. Stage Technician: Jocelyn Riche. Chorus of the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. Orchestre National de Lille.

Photos: Frédéric Iovino/Opéra de Lille

 

I initially bought tickets for this Lille production of The Makropoulos Case because Véronique Gens was cast as Emilia. A favourite work, by a favourite composer, with a singer whose take on the role was one I was interested in witnessing - and in a town I like. I booked seats for the final performance, the only one compatible with my diary, then went through the usual rigmarole online: locating a convenient hotel, with parking, that accepts dogs, and a decent restaurant near the opera house open late enough on a Monday night. In the event, Gens dropped out and was replaced by Aušrinė Stundytė. But, having seen the latter in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s memorable 2019 production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, I wasn’t as disappointed by the news as I might have been.

So on Monday night, there I was, in Lille. The Lille Opera has a chequered history - both its buildings, and as an institution This is no place to go into all that, but for those interested, here’s a link to its English-language entry on Wikipedia. And here’s another, to the house’s own website, where it will be clear that their programming, if limited, is intriguing.

Kornél Mundruczó, new to me, is a Hungarian actor, film-maker and director. His production of Věc Makropulos was first staged ten years ago by the Opera-Ballet Vlaanderen (based in Antwerp and Ghent), and won an International Opera Award. A 2020 revival in Geneva was severely impacted by Covid restrictions: the orchestra was, so I read, replaced by a recording and the audience kept to a minimum. It is, unsurprisingly, cinematic in feel, using large-scale projections, and influenced by various iconic directors and their works, cited by Mundruczó in a programme interview. As befits the plot, it straddles a borderline between naturalism and fantasy: magic realism is also mentioned in the article.

 

Lille is to be congratulated for reviving it in style, with a full orchestra - the Lille National - in the pit (big enough for 100 musicians); it was a real privilege to see and hear this fascinating work up close (I was on row G), with a strong, well-directed cast, in a 1,100-seat house with good acoustics - in recent years, I’ve only seen it at the Bastille, albeit in Warlikowski’s super production.

Mundruczó's uses only two sets and runs without a break. It opens in an anonymous, wood-panelled courtroom. A large allegory of justice hangs above the tribune, with its row of microphones, piles of files, and row of hi-tech seats. During the bounding orchestral prelude, bikers in full-face helmets, all black, rifle methodically through the files on the desk until one holds up a paper for all to see. They leave, and as the characters take their places, we are plunged into a driver's-view video of a ride through a snowy forest landscape.

When Emilia enters, in jeans, a little checked jacket, short-cropped hair and sunglasses (the director mentions Bowie and Björk as influences), she’s carrying the same kind of helmet. So, curiously, is Hauk-Schendorf, when his time comes. Were they both among those mysterious bikers? Was it Emilia who found and brandished the paper? What was the paper? The formula she was out to recover, or a symbol of it? Was our short ride on a fast machine through the snowy forest Emilia taking the paper home, or Emilia riding to the courthouse? I didn’t work this puzzle out, and found no clarification in the programme notes. What was clear from the start, however, was that the revival (by Marcos Darbyshire, an Argentine director who worked with Mundruczó on the 2016 original) was very professionally directed.

 

One significant detail before I move on. As the director’s emphasis is less on Emilia’s opera-diva glamour, more on her frailty and vulnerability, suspended in some liminal space between life and death, even at this early stage in the story she has one arm bandaged. She doubles up, as if with cramps, staggers, nearly collapses, and, unseen, coughs up not blood but, less expectedly and more startlingly, a viscous black liquid.

For the rest of the opera, there’s neither empty stage nor hotel room. We move, instead, to Emilia’s spacious lodge on the edge of a forest, a liminal space, far from city life and social norms. The decor is contemporary, but with the odd hint at art deco. Through a window on the left and another, panoramic one, at the rear, we see the snowy forest in life-size videos. There are some boxy, modern armchairs with a coffee-table in front of a roaring fire, and opposite, to the right, a kitchen island with high chairs, a sink, and, in the wall, a giant fridge. Masses of flowers have been pulled from their vases and litter the floor. Later, Emilia will stuff them into a bin bag.

But there’s also a hospital drip, with a pouch of viscous black liquid hanging from a steel stand on wheels, and on the bedroom platform in front of the huge rear window, an array of blinking medical equipment on a rack. Every time the fridge door is opened, which is quite often, it emits clouds of steam, bathed in a blaze of golden light from within (Felice Ross’s lighting is excellent throughout, as usual), and inside we see neither food nor drink, but neat rows of drip pouches, filled with a black, viscous liquid.

Emilia, cold, now has a fake fur thrown on carelessly over running shorts and long johns, or perhaps tracksuit bottoms. From now on, her clothes, even her hair, will be gradually stripped away, like days peeled off a calendar, as magic - or another reality, beyond life - takes over from realism. Hauk-Schendorf, for example, arrives, helmet in hand, in strobe-lighting against a gauzy curtain; his episodes could be dream sequences, while Emilia hovers, fragile and vulnerable in her bald head and bandages, in a liminal space between her exhaustingly long past and the prospect of relief - one way or the other.

She is, of course, fading earlier than the libretto suggests. And, bizarrely, none of those pressing in on her, nagging her, needing her, seems to notice the bandages, the drip, the viscous black liquid. But I think that’s the Mundruczó’s point: they’re all self-obsessed, oblivious to Emilia’s own state - of exhaustion, disillusionment, insensibility, suffering. Only Hauk-Schendorf signals his affection, giving the drip pouch a jolly squeeze to reinject some viscous black vitality into her.

Reality, then, slips away with Emilia’s clothes, even her skin: scratching at her thighs, she strips it off under her nails. Instead of blood, viscous black liquid oozes out. In a spine-tinglingly moving moment, as she sings ‘I could feel death's hand on me. It was not so dreadful,’ she smiles in relief and relaxes her shojlder, as if at that very moment she's made her mind up, and the weight of life can also now slip deliciously away.

At the very end, the others move back to line up like statues in the darkness, the formula goes up in flames, the contents of the lodge - everything, including the kitchen sink - rise magically into the air, and Emilia sings her final ‘Our father…’ in Greek. Curtain.

 

My usual fear with a Janáček work is that, faced with some killer vocal writing, the men might let the side down. Here, there was none of that, though veteran baroque specialist Jean-Paul Fouchécourt - he joined Les Arts Florissants 40 years ago - mustered less sheer volume than those around him. Experience tells, though: combining vocal and dramatic subtlety, he fashioned a thoroughly charming Hauk-Schendorf, radiating faded urbanity. (I was going to add, ‘in the little time available,’ but it turns out, according to the conductor, Dennis Russell Davies, that Hauk-Schendorf has the longest continuous intervention in the score.)

Character tenor Paul Kaufmann, first on after the orchestral prelude, set the tone for the evening with an unusually rich, resounding Vitek, here portrayed as a scruffy lush, sleeping under the courtroom desk. How he managed to sing so well while hopping about on one foot as he pulled his socks on was a mystery to me. Jan Hnyk (the only actual Czech in the cast) was a vocally glowing Dr Kolenatý, a firm, deep, crunchy baritone and perhaps, to me, the best of the men overall. He painted a convincing portrait of the bustling, bewildered lawyer.

Denys Pivnitskyi (Albert) has an ample tenor voice, as broad as his engaging smile, as muscular as his figure and as vigorous as his acting. Like many a Bertik, he could only take a passing swipe at the two or three stratospheric notes in the score, but they are split-second affairs, not ‘Nessun Dorma’, and I preferred his robust singing overall to some of his bleating forebears in the same role.

Browsing back over the years, I found I’d already seen our Jaroslav Prus. Over twenty years ago, on the subject of The Bassarids at the Châtelet, I wrote ‘Robin Adams was an interesting find as Captain of the Royal Guard.’ Well spotted, though I say it myself. Though listed as a baritone, his voice sounds to me very much bass-baritone, dark and rock-solid. He, along with both Paul Kaufmann and especially Jan Hnyk, are definitely singers I’d be happy to find on cast lists in the future. With Krista, Emilia herself, and 100 musicians in the pit, they unfortunately left the elegant but softer-voiced Janek, Florian Panzieri, somewhat in the shade.

Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur somehow sandwiched a triumphal Néris, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées last week, between two Kristas in Lille, one the night before, one the night after. She offers, I wrote, ‘a picture of vocal health, with a rich, powerful, sumptuous, grainy mezzo voice, not too dark, consistent in timbre and strength from top to bottom.’ In other words, a Krista de luxe.

And so I come to Aušrinė Stundytė. I’ve thought hard about how to describe her performance as Emilia Marty, when in fact it was everything you can imagine if you already know her voice, and her dramatic commitment and talents. Not a beautiful voice - I wouldn’t expect to hear her soon, or ever, as Arabella or in the Four Last Songs. Soon to be 50, she’s worked it hard in dramatic roles, and the result is quite a, yes, hard, inflexible sound, with echoes of her unforgettable forerunner in the role, Anja Silja. But her voice is quite consistent, she still has all the notes, and the top ones, just when you fear the worst, ring out like a bell. Anyway, Emilia Marty isn’t Arabella or (Die ägyptische) Helena, it’s one of those roles where acting is at least as important as vocal beauty, and on the acting side, Stundytė can scarcely be faulted. ‘Elle a eu des moments magnifiques,’ said my neighbour, summing it all up.

Among his credentials, Dennis Russell Davies can list several seasons as principal conductor of the Brno Philharmonic, and it shows. His reading of the score was marvellously symphonic and the orchestra (another potential weak link in Janáček performances) rose to the occasion with gusto. The risk, with a symphonic approach to opera, is that the singers may be left to fend for themselves while the conductor focuses on the pit, but this was by no means the case here; and the cinemascope sound suited Kornél Mundruczó’s cinematic production to a tee.

A couple of weeks ago, after Das Wunder der Heliane in Strasbourg, I remarked on ‘the imagination shown in their programming by France’s regional opera houses.’ This Věc Makropulos is another example of the tenacity and creativity of these houses in face of adversity. These are turbulent times in culture as elsewhere, and Lille Opera in particular has had a troubled history and (as a glance at the schedule I linked to above will show) offers only three or four works a year with full orchestra. But they soldier on, they stage some interesting rarities in one format or another, and it’s heartwarming to find performances of this quality still going on in France’s 25-or-so regional opera theatres. We’re lucky to have them. For how long, I wonder.