The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera, September 2022
Posted on 19 September 2022A centuries-old lady retains her youth and beauty thanks to an elixir. In Karel Čapek’s story, the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II — notorious for his patronage of the occult — asked his alchemists to create a potion that would confer an additional 300 years of life. He was told to try it out on his sixteen year old daughter Elina, and when she became gravely ill he was imprisoned as a fraud. See my review in The Article.