raping nature
by
Douglas Messerli
Jaroslav
Kvapil (libretto), Antonín Dvořák (composer), Mary Zimmerman (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Rusalka / 2017 [The
Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
I feel somewhat
uncomfortable beginning an essay by talking about water sprites and a dangerous
Water Gnome (Eric Owen), let alone focusing on the Gnome’s daughter, Rusalka (Kristine
Opolais), who like H. C. Andersen’s famed little mermaid, having fallen in the
love with the local Prince (Brandon
Jovanovich), wants to be transformed to a human being. The witch Ježibaba
(wonderfully performed by Jamie Barton), along with her rat, crow, and
half-cat, are only too happy to provide her a potion, while assuring her that
if he does not take her on as his lover, he will die and she will be
permanently outcast from spirit world—oh, and she has to get him to love
without the power of human speech. You might suspect that we are back in the
“topsy-turvy” land of W. S. Gilbert instead of Antonín Dvořák’s early 20th century opera.
But act two makes it clear, despite the
fact that Rusalka hardly gets a chance to sing, that the heart of this opera is
a bit closer to Wagner’s Tristan and
Isolde and even, in parts, has more elements of the great Ring than of Hansel and Gretel.
The Prince does indeed fall in love
with the beautiful Rusalka, but given her muteness and her resistance to his
kisses, has little choice but to keep another potential love on hand, in this
case the Foreign Princess (Katarina Dalayman). The Princess, robed in colors of
red, is all ego and fire, while the
pale, white-robed Rusalka is as silent and cold as the moon with which she is
associated.
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Most of act Two is played out in the
form of an elaborate and erotically-charged Baroque-like series of dances
(marvelously choreographed by Austin McCormick) which not only appall poor
Rusalka but represent the antithesis of her spiritual existence. Indeed, during
the first intermissions, singer Opolais described that performing Rusalka was a
presentation of a soul rather than of a heart. In their elaborately brocaded
costumes these dancers are almost entirely about frivolous flirtation and
meaningless passion.
Worried for his daughter, the Water
Gnome appears at the party to reassure her and argue for the necessity of
winning over the Prince; yet his daughter can only see how things are. As
director Mary Zimmerman suggested, no love can be consummated when one of the lovers
is hiding her true identity, and is not allowed to express the truth.
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When the Prince finally determines to
transfer his attentions to the Foreign Princess, he is rejected by both women,
as Rusalka escapes her palace isolation and the Princess mocks the Prince’s
sudden transformation.
Act Three is simply—or maybe not so
imply—a fulfilling of Ježibaba’s warnings. Poor Rusalka, wandering what is now
a fallen world, is indeed frozen out of the world’s one-time beauty, yet
refuses to possibly save herself by personally killing her former lover.
Unfortunately, in this last act the
composer felt the need to wrap up everything by reintroducing nearly all of the
opera’s characters, including the minor servants of Act Two, the dancing water
sprites, Ježibaba and her consorts, and the Water Gnome before returning the
bereaved and sorrowful Prince, who, even when he is told that kissing his
former lover will mean his death, would prefer living with her in eternity than
losing forever her embrace.
Yet even their Tristan and Isolde moment
does not release them, as her father explains; in his world there is no such
thing as human sacrifice, only death. And, at opera’s end Rusalka, as promised,
is now an eternal wanderer who cannot share in the spiritual nor the world of
human passion.
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It’s easy to imagine in this opera that the intruder is Rusalka, a thing of nature who insists upon entering the human world, destroying and being destroyed in the process. But the true barbarian, if we think more clearly, is the Prince, who takes up with the natural world only because of its beauty, without realizing that there are consequences for his conquering and then abandoning nature. In short, Rusalka might be read as a work in which mankind’s need to conquer the world around results in his own destruction—a highly prescient subject given our concerns today.
Despite conductor Sir Mark Elder’s long
devotion to what he describes as a major opera, however, the very subject
matter of Ruslka, particularly given
its clotted last act, and its rough-hewn roots in folklore, make for a less
profound experience that many great operas. Having said that, this work, and
particularly the new MET production, with its numerous beautifully musical and
dance moments, with lovely sets and costumes as well, help to reveal the opera's
many charms—all of which the MET opera-goers, both inside the opera house
itself and inside the movie theater in which I sat, highly appreciated.
Los Angeles,
February 26, 2017
