Poor Rusalka. The title character of Antonin Dvorak’s opera is a water nymph in love, misunderstood and scorned. She has long been appreciated, but was not exactly celebrated as an operatic heroine for decades before slowly becoming a darling of the opera world.
But now “Rusalka” is experiencing a moment that can charm even the most jaded water nymphs. The opera will make its debut next month at Milan’s La Scala, 122 years after it first delighted audiences in 1901 in Dvorak’s home country of the Czech Republic. collected at La Scala it is an opportunity to discover or rediscover an opera that is still being interpreted more than a century later.
“Rusalka”, which plays six performances from June 6 to 22, is based on Slavic folklore (with parallels to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”). Rusalka lives in a lake with her father, a water goblin, and falls in love with a prince. With the help of a local witch and a potion, she decides to become a human to win her prince. Let’s just say things don’t go exactly the way she wants.
The opera is best known for its first act aria ‘Song to the Moon’ – championed by many high-profile sopranos over the decades, including Renée Fleming – which has helped cement its position at several major opera houses. And now at La Scala.
“I have directed many opera houses and in the repertoire of each of them there was at least one opera that was conspicuously absent,” Dominique Meyer, La Scala’s artistic director and CEO, said by email. “When I directed the Vienna [State] Opera, we realized that ‘Anna Bolena’ had never been performed there. At La Scala something similar happened with ‘Rusalka’.”
Mr. Meyer said the debut production was the ideal vehicle to bring back Emma Dante, a theater and film director known for her 2013 film “A Street in Palermo” and avant-garde theater and opera productions. Mr. Meyer called her “imagination and sensitivity.”
“I am happy to return to La Scala with an opera whose protagonist is a woman,” Ms. Dante said in a video interview. “My first time was with ‘Carmen’ and I felt a strong connection with this woman, just as I do now with Rusalka.”
Ms. Dante said she feels Rusalka’s journey to the human world – and her desire to be accepted there – is a timeless subject and applicable today in a world of refugees and global political unrest.
“She’s arriving in a country that’s not her country, so I’m interested in that transformation,” said Ms. Dante. “I’m also very interested in how the community doesn’t accept its diversity.”
She teamed up with costume designer Vanessa Sannino and set designer Carmine Maringola, both of whom she had previously worked with, to do more than emphasize the fairytale aspect of the story.
“This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus, which you can see in a wheelchair when she first comes ashore,” Ms. Dante explained. “We won’t have any more either, but instead the Prince’s church and palace will both be flooded to represent a world adrift.” This flooded world is a catastrophic cause of non-acceptance, of intolerance towards people of different origins and appearances.”
Ms. Sannino also wanted to highlight the witch and the prince in this otherworldly setting.
“We wanted the witch to be like a madonna, monochromatic red and immense and made of muscle fibers,” she said. “And the lightness we have decided to give the prince is reflected in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears.”
This approach seems appropriate for an opera based on folklore, and not for example a romantic Italian opera based on a famous book and specific to that time and place. It is also open to discovery from a musical perspective.
“It’s genius music, but Dvorak was not known as a typical opera composer, and so it comes with some difficulties that may not always sell the piece,” Czech conductor Tomas Hanus said in a telephone interview from his home in Brno, Czech Republic. . . He makes his debut at La Scala with “Rusalka”, which he also conducted at the Vienna State Opera (where he made his debut in 2017) and in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Munich. “The Czech schools of composition did not always teach how to write these great romantic opera scores. It is very dependent on the interpretation of singers and conductors.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Ukrainian soprano Olga Bezsmertna, who will sing the title role, which she’s grown to love (she sang it at the Vienna State Opera in 2014 and 2020, and last year in Bratislava, Slovakia). Every time she sings it, it becomes more layered, she said.
“It’s a very difficult opera, but my voice feels at home because I don’t have to push,” Ms Bezsmertna said in a telephone interview from her home in Vienna. “My first time in Vienna, I jumped in five days before the first performance. I honestly didn’t have time to think about what to do. But it’s perfect for a lyric soprano voice.”
Ms. Bezsmertna has grown more into the character in recent years, she said, especially the journey Rusalka takes both emotionally and musically.
“The second act is so completely different from the first act because it was destroyed,” Ms Bezsmertna said. “It is no longer a fairy tale. She is alone and the prince loves another woman. Life has completely changed.”
And it’s in that fairytale-versus-real-world situation where “Rusalka” seems to flourish, despite its dark corners, for those familiar with the opera or first-time viewers upon its debut at La Scala.
“Death is very present in ‘Rusalka,’ but we have to keep this idea of lightness,” Ms. Dante said. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s still a fairy tale. And we should always see death as an opportunity for rebirth.”