“I Puritani” and “The Makropoulos Case”

I.
Saturday 10. You wait forever for the bus you want, then two arrive at the same time. “I Puritani”, an infrequently performed opera of exquisite melodic abundance, is receiving two new top-level productions during the 2025-2026 season - one at the New York Metropolitan Opera with its premiere on New Year’s Eve, the other to come at Covent Garden on June 30. Remarkably, the same soprano, Lisette Oropesa, is cast as the heroine of both.

I went to the Belsize Park Everyman cinema (London NW3) to watch the live HD relay of the New York Met’s production: you could book a £69.50p sofa for two - my companion’s choice rather than mine. Although this price was much higher than those to be found for other opera-showing cinemas, it included free champagne, as well as an introductory talk by the production’s British designer-director, Charles Edwards. The audience looked and behaved as if it had been airlifted in from the Glyndebourne bus. (Some had brought picnics). You could even open a little shelf on which to rest your champagne glass.

I mention these glasses (I drink champagne,  but not during a performance) because, if you sat towards the back of the cinema, as I did, you had an initially puzzling view, with multiple tiny refractions of the cinema screen, just below the screen itself. At first, I thought those in the more forward rows had been given tiny iPhone-like screens to duplicate the experience. But no: the champagne glasses were reflecting the screen - a fascinating effect of visual multiplication.

In his introduction, Edwards countered the conventional view that “I Puritani” (1835) has sublime music but a weak story. For him, the “Puritani” story (love and madness during the English civil wars of the 1640s) is strong, with Bellini’s melodies sublimating the sublime. Hm. Does Edwards’s production gives the story all the strength he claims for it? The indoor space he has created for the opening scene seems to be a chapel, but characters make vivid entrances with bright smiles that do not accord with my notion of Puritan churchgoing (I come from long lines of Covenanters). At the Belsize Everyman, the speakers added a further layer of initial confusion: orchestral sound is close and brilliant, but the chorus and some individual charaters sounds as if they are offstage (“Come indoors!” I whispered to the chorus). Fortunately, this fault was eradicated within the first half-hour.

But why was Lisette Oropesa, playing Elvira, lit and filmed in a way that showed, in scene free scene, a faint moustache on her pretty face? And why was King Charles I’s queen Henrietta Maria (Enrichetta di Francia, an important stage character in this opera) brightly costumed as if she were celebrating and as if Britain were not involved in civil war? Why was Elvira going nuts about her fiancé Arturo spending time with a mysterious other woman when the production had just shown Elvira fraternising with that other woman (Henrietta Maria)?

Is this story remotely strong? Edwards beefs it up at the end, with lots of deaths instead of the general pardon and survival that Bellini had in mind - but it’s hard to feel that this opera is serious about the intense divisions within the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. It’s also unusually long - almost four hours with just one interval, even though this Met version still omits the final Elvira aria that Richard Bonynge resurrected for Joan Sutherland. And, although there’s not a weak bar and although Bellini is adding new harmonic dissonances to striking effect, he here just doesn’t build his music drama with the larger structural power that still can make his “La Sonnambula” and “Norma” so powerful.

Marco Armiliato, who handles so much of the Met’s Italian repertory, conducted everything with handsome orchestral lustre and expansively stylish phrasing, highlighting the novel harmonies with which Bellini, soon before his early death, was extending his art. Oropesa and tenor Lawrence Brownlee sang  their hearts out adorably as Elvira and Arturo. Oropesa does not scintillate when it comes to articulating coloratura divisions; but she phrases the melodies with feeling and good diction - a far more touching performance than her too-collected Violetta at Covent Garden three years ago. As the Puritan leader Riccardo, the Polish baritone Artur Ruciński (who sang the similar role of Enrico in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” at Covent Garden two years ago) was replaced, just for this performance, by the Puerto Rican baritone Ricardo José Rivera, an impressively efficient singer. Edwards’s production treated the bass role of Giorgio Valton (Elvira’s uncle) as a barihunk role - we could tell that Christian van Horn, a Met regular, was going to strip off his shirt to show us his torso long before he did just that.

The Covent Garden production (June 30 - July 19) already carries the advance warning “There are depictions of knife violence. Some of the characters in this production experience the challenges of mental health.” The director Richard Jones is likely to give his production a visual and acting look far from the Met’s one, but beyond that, no predictions should be made.


II.

Between 1964 and 2010, buses marked “The Makropoulos Case” kept coming around in British opera. English National Opera (including its Sadler’s Wells Opera precursor) staged two productions in this years; Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne Opera gave one each; all those productions were revived. To me, this is good news - I find “Makropoulos Case” probably the greatest opera by Leos Janáček, a composer almost all of whose operas I find wonderful opera c. I’m proud, too, that conductors (chiefly but not only Charles Mackerras) and singers have responded: the central role of Emilia Marty has challenged a number of superb singing actresses to top form. Yet when Covent Garden announced its new production for last November, advance sales were poor, and eventual sales were not much better. Although Jakub Hrůśa conducted excellently, he could never quite counter the problems of Katie Mitchell’s production. Neither could the soprano Ausryne Stundyte, though a lively actress.

Fortunately - the opera’s stage centenary is approaching this December - Simon Rattle’s cycle of Janáček operas with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican reached this opera this week. “The Makropoulos Case” is the fifth in Rattle’s series. The German soprano Marlis Petersen, who was singing Emilia Marty in Vienna last month, is a superb interpreter of the role - vocally vivid, dramatically incisive. Although, to my ear, Rattle doesn’t achieve an entirely Czech sound, he certainly gets beautiful playing from the London Symphony Orchestra. The concert context makes us all pay new attention to instrumental details. It also helps us to analyse Janáček’s way with music drama - the way that the orchestra, on the one hand, makes us feel everything is part of a large process, but also the way in which moments in the drama set off leitmotifs that billow around in tiny whorls and eddies. Although much of Janáček’s vocal writing feels conversational, there are striking exceptions. When the dying heroine announces her name to be “Elina Makropoulos” one last time, she does so in two, prolonged, slow, radiant glorious arcs - arcs that, though quiet, transcend the whole opera: a simple statement of identity that feels like an epiphany . A little later, the strings quote them. Until now, few other characters have been able to believe that Emilia can be over three hundred years old: but here her veracity wins everyone over. “The Makropoulos Case”, like almost all Janácek’s operas, has been pulsating with the plenitude of life itself, but now the passing of this one life becomes a signal event, a moment when life itself becomes newly apparent to us in all its colour and its long/short duration.

@Alastair Macaulay 2026