The Makropulos Affair (opera) - Composition History

Composition History

Janáček's operatic version was written between 1923 and 1925. He had seen the play early in its run in Prague on 10 December 1922, and immediately saw its potential. He entered into a correspondence with Čapek, who was accommodating towards the idea, although legal problems in securing the rights to the play delayed work. When these problems were cleared on 10 September 1923, Janáček began work on the opera straight away. He wrote the libretto himself, and by December 1924 had completed the first draft of the work. He spent another year refining the score, before completing it on 3 December 1925.

Musically, much of the piece has little in the way of thematic development, instead presenting the listener with a mass of different motifs and ideas. Janáček's writings indicate that this was a deliberate ploy to give musical embodiment to the disruptive, unsettling main character Emilia Marty/Elina Makropulos. Only at the end of the final act, when Makropulos' vulnerability is revealed, does the music tap into and develop the rich lyrical vein that has driven it throughout.

It is often argued that Emilia Marty, like the other female heroes in Janáček's later operas, stands for one of the aspects of Kamila Stösslová, the woman with whom he was in love for the last decade of his life. Marty, with a clever and manipulative exterior hiding a core of vulnerability, is a 'snapshot' of Stösslová, like the coquettish and shy Cunning Little Vixen and the tragic Káťa Kabanová.