“I must destroy you,” sings Rusalka, the water nymph and title character of Antonín Dvořák’s only opera of enduring popularity, to the unnamed Prince, whose love she finally reclaims in a soaring finale that takes both of their lives. Having escaped her aquatic habitat to follow love’s call, Rusalka, bound to silence, cannot surmount the pitfalls of mortal existence. When the Prince is distracted by the wiles of the Foreign Princess, Rusalka must forsake the human world, only to find that her paramour, himself jilted by the Foreign Princess for his inconstancy, has returned to her, accepting the deaths to which their temptation of fate has condemned them.
The myth of the water nymph—the mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen, the undine of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the Rhine Maidens of Richard Wagner, and the rusalka of Slavic lore—brims with familiar philosophical tropes. Mastery of true love lies in self-discipline. Ungoverned passions lead to ruin. Feminine self-sacrifice ennobles all. To the Romantic imagination that seized Germanic Europe until the First World War sent it into paroxysms of hopelessness and doubt, these themes were irresistible.
Dvořák was of course Czech, but his cultural contexts hewed close to those of his German fellow subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even in their insistence on a separate national culture, the Czech intellectuals who collected national myths could not disguise sharings and borrowings from their close neighbors. When Rusalka premiered in 1901, the empire was less than two decades away from its demise, but few could have foreseen that outcome or objected to a plot of overlapping cultural idioms.
Just over a century later, Martin Kušej, an Austrian director whose Slovenian roots recall the multiethnic polity that produced Dvořák, and who now leads Vienna’s Burgtheater, sought to humanize the myth. His production for Munich, which was revived for this year’s opera festival, dates back to 2010, not long after regional news reported the horrifying tragedy of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who had been imprisoned in a basement and sexually abused by her father for twenty-four years. Rusalka’s watery realm, accordingly, is a basement with leaky pipes, where she is kept with other creatures, perhaps her siblings, and from which she fervently pleads for escape. The opera’s signature aria, the “Song to the Moon,” thus morphs from an innocent imploring of the celestial satellite for love to a desperate cry for deliverance.
As in the legend, entering the human world offers fleeting happiness. Rendered silent due to the terms of her release from the realm of water spirits, Rusalka finds contemporary human life callous and cruel. Her introduction to it sees her tossed over the Prince’s shoulder, like prey, as he struts about as a brash huntsman. In one of Kušej’s more tasteless moments, the grand polonaise for the Prince’s guests is a sadistic dance performed by people partnered with skinned animals. When the final strains resound, the assembled crowd begins to devour them with relish.
In a more metaphorical scene of devouring, the Foreign Princess does not merely bat her eyes at the Prince but fully seduces him, leading him away to copulate in evening dress as the hapless Rusalka looks on. Rusalka’s return to the watery realm of her origin begins with yearning—here it involves her full submersion in a fish tank just big enough to accommodate her but not voluminous enough to allow for escape. We then see her father—a censorious water sprite in the original tale but an abusive tyrant here—placed under arrest while she and her sisters end up in an antiseptic insane asylum. The Prince finds her there. He is so remorseful that when he learns Rusalka has been charged by her father to kill him, he takes the initiative in doing himself in with the knife she wields.
For all its liberties, Kušej’s production rather effectively grasps one of the myth’s best themes—that transcending one’s nature through self-destructive enchantment is a perilous path unlikely to be blessed with success. A starry cast helped put it over. In the title role, the flourishing soprano Asmik Grigorian, the daughter of the late great Armenian heroic tenor Gegam Grigorian and the Lithuanian soprano Irena Milkevičiūtė, radiated immense, arresting energy that dominated the stage. Already accomplished in Puccini roles worldwide, she carried romance to the point of disaster.
Since the opera was performed in the original Czech, it was probably a good idea to cast as the Prince a tenor who solidly knows that language. Pavol Breslik is from Slovakia, close enough to add faultless diction and mellifluous Slavic sonorities. One might, however, have wished for a stronger voice to keep up with Grigorian. Breslik rarely wanted for ardor, but sometimes his high notes, particularly the A-flat in the final duet, proved elusive.
The Russian soprano Elena Guseva sang with seductive charm as the Foreign Princess. The resplendent Okka von der Damerau sang the part of Ježibaba, the witch who grants Rusalka her wish to join the Prince’s realm, with arch pitilessness. The aptly named German bass Christof Fischesser was a menacing Water Sprite, though perhaps not as menacing as the father in the tragic news item that appears to have inspired the production.
The English conductor Edward Gardner was formerly the director of the English National Opera, which has fallen on hard times of late, and now heads the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. He led a taut and tight performance.
