Rusalka

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Image courtesy of Liceu.

When Dvořák returned from his travels to America in 1895, he was a different man. After abandoning the symphony as a genre, he dedicated the last decade of his life to two exuberant musical forms: the symphonic poem and opera. The extraordinarily poetic works that resulted were Dvořák’s attempt to reach the heart of the Czech spirit, expressing through music and theatre the stories most cherished by his countrymen.

Rusalka — a lyrical fable in three acts — premiered in Prague in 1901, and is, alongside Smetana's The Bartered Bride, the best-known and most beloved opera in the Czech repertoire. A masterpiece of Romantic lyricism, it tells the story of a water nymph who takes on human nature and pays a cruel price for it.

Dvořák had already shown his interest in Czech folklore through a series of symphonic poems inspired by the popular ballads of Karel Jaromír Erben. He decisively adopted a libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil, centered around a water spirit or nymph, inspired by Undine (1811) by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué and The Little Mermaid (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen.

Asmik Grigorian and Piotr Beczala will star in the performances of this new production, which is a collaboration between the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden, the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the Teatro Real, and the Palau de les Arts in Valencia. A subtle and psychological interpretation by Christof Loy, Rusalka becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of communication between two worlds.

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