I return to this near-dormant blog part-way through the present Opera Australia run of Rusalka. (Image above from Opera Australia, from last year’s WA opera performances.)
I have been twice so far and will return for the last night.
This is an Opera Conference production which was first seen in Perth last year. In the first act there is an ingenious and striking approach to the divide between the watery and terrestrial worlds. This is carried forward into the second and third acts which are otherwise, from a scenic point of view, economically executed. A lot is done with costumes and props.
The wood-nymphs are my personal-favourite part of the production. The whole opera has a kind of mild Wagnerianism adapted to Dvořák’s own folksy manner, and there is a wink in homage to Wagner’s Rhine maidens. This is heightened by the casting of Warwick Fyfe in the Alberich-equivalent role of the Water King, especially in the opening scene which riffs off the opening of Das Rheingold. The nymphs’ return in Act III has a structural role rather like the Rhine maidens’ meeting with Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. They have wonderful costumes and I particularly like their Entlike heads and their bough-like arms which are deployed in a singer-friendly mode of dancing.
Nicole Car is a strong Rusalka. It first I felt (preconceptions set by exposure to Eileen Hannan in the 1986 ENO production, who had a special kind of wistfulness) that she was too strong, but I now see this is as consistent with a recasting (in their making-up-for-Lyndon mode, we are told through the PR, a little-modishly, that this is a feminist slant) which confers agency on Rusalka, albeit that she is still trapped in the laws of nature.
At the beginning of the shortish (6 performances only) run I could see that, apart from the first night, there were still plenty of seats available. Word of mouth and favourable reviews have obviously elicited a response and the remainder of the run is quite fully-booked.
Rusalka has never fallen out of the repertoire for the Czechs but it has taken a while for the opera as a whole, as opposed to Rusalka’s Song to the Moon, to reach the wider operatic world. In 1993 or so, when as part of the Festival of Sydney, Opera Australia mounted a concert version, we were told that while this was our first Rusalka, it was the Czech conductor’s four-hundred-and-somethingth performance.
Unfortunately, for my own record of posterity, the 2007 Opera Australia production came just before the inception of this blog. My memory of it has faded over time and is slightly overshadowed by the subsequent (to me slightly comic) grumbling of Bruce Martin about how he had been captured in the Chandos recording which then became part of a bit of a culture-war about Richard Hickox’s casting decisions. The actual production, as I recall, was a bit daggy rather in the way of the infamous pocket Rheingold of the (then) Australian Opera’s aborted 1980s Ring Cycle.
In 2011 I saw the Stefan Herheim production at Dresden. I was totally mystified by the regie konzept (it turns out it was all a mid-life crisis in the mind of the Water King – Rusalka was his own fantasy-projections on a street-walker; the foreign princess, who he eventually murdered, was his wife) but that was and remains the most wondrous feat of stage craft in an opera I have ever seen in the flesh. Musical values, especially the orchestra, weren’t half bad either.
Topical trivia: Conductor Johannes Fritzsch, whose presence in Australia started with his fresh-over-the-wall arrival in Sydney in 1992 to conduct OA’s Moschinsky Hansel and Gretel and his marriage to Susan Collins, then deputy concertmaster for the OA orchestra, was the conductor for the first outing of the Herheim production at Graz.
In 2014 I caught Barry Kosky’s version at the Komische Oper which also had more than a few mind-bending moments, though musically not up to the Dresden standard (the KO is in many ways Berlin’s ENO, except that ENO is no longer what it was).
What is Rusalka about? It’s often said that no fairy story is innocent, and that is probably why Rusalka has so often invited regie-ish metaplots. This version doesn’t go so far, and instead, to my mind, focuses on a clearly delineated exposition from which (with a nudge or two) you can draw your own conclusions. The traditional line seems to be “be careful what you wish for” which I suppose for children can be an appropriate “grass isn’t always greener” warning. To that you might add the gulf between “nature” and the world of man [not entirely sic – “nature” has a tendency to be rendered feminine], and the unknowability of the other. Who really knows what their pet is thinking?
I can’t resist another image of the OA wood-nymphs, returning in Act III at the front rather than the rear of the stage, with Nicole Car by now a will-o-the-wisp.
And, in the end still most important to me, the music is gorgeous.
Stumbling on melons 