OGSA Logo

The Opera Guild assists local voice students, both undergraduate and graduate, with scholarships, grants, competitive prizes, and opportunities to perform for the community.

Top OGSA Events
(click an event for details)
  • April 28: FREE Member Party
Tucson Opera Calendar
(Click here for full month's events; click a date to see that day's event.)
  • Home
  • FREE Opera Previews
  • Quest for the Best
  • Listen to our Singers
  • Videos about OGSA
  • Read Past Newsletters
  • Photo Gallery
  • About Us
    • Board of Directors
    • Bylaws
    • Our Supporters
  • For Students: Grants, Scholarships, Applications
    • About Grants and Scholarships
    • Grant Application
  • Opera Analyses
  • Contact Us
Join or Renew Now!
Donate
Tucson Web Design by
Nuanced Media logo
Home » Rusalka: Not your Disney Mermaid!

Rusalka: Not your Disney Mermaid!

October 28, 2016 by Frank Finkenberg

OGSA’s president Carol Garrard gives the story of Dvořák’s dark fairy-tale opera, which we are previewing on November 9 and 11, 2016.

Undine, by John William WaterhouseIf you took your children or grandchildren to Walt Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and are hoping to replicate that experience with more elegant singing—well, Rusalka is not the opera for you.

The ninth of Antonín Dvořák’s ten operas, it alone has entered the repertoire. It contains one of opera’s greatest hits, Rusalka’s beautiful Act I “Song to the Moon,” with its haunting glissando string motif.  There is a great deal of other beautiful music in this fairy tale made into opera, but its ending of doom for both the eponymous heroine and her lover is dark indeed.

Rusalka is based on Czech and German folk tales that have often ‘surfaced’ in literature, opera and ballet.  A notable example is the novella Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. (See the illustration at right by J.W. Waterhouse.) In Fouqué’s story the water nymph gets her legs, and she gets her man too.  Yes, he betrays her, but they are reunited in love, and as the curtain goes down, they die in each other’s arms.

Rusalka has an altogether more troubling denouement.  The plot is that of the water nymph who falls in love with a mortal she has seen at her lake, and as this is opera, naturally he is a prince.  The witch Ježibaba allows her to become human to wed her prince, but utters two conditions:  Rusalka must remain forever silent to the prince, and he must always remain true.  Should either condition be broken, both will be damned.  Naturally, Rusalka and the prince fall madly in love and the  first act ends. 

The second act has a mute Rusalka, plotted against by an evil foreign princess, who convinces the Prince to reject poor Rusalka. Well, what about the poor soprano in this act?  Renee Fleming, the foremost Rusalka of our time, asks in her autobiography (The Inner Voice:  the Making of a Singer, p. 186) how is one to express despair here, since “…performing an act without singing seemed at first to be comparable to a violinist’s performing a concert without a violin.” Fleming managed to solve the problem by working intensively with choreographers for this act.  This meant finding a physical language where face and body must substitute for sound.  This compounds the demands on the soprano exponentially. 

But it sets up the audience for a thriller, however dark, of a third act ending.  Rusalka is crushed by the Prince’s rejection, but she refuses the witch’s offer to save herself by killing the Prince.  Repentant, the Prince returns to the lake looking for Rusalka.  She explains her silence, and warns him that now her kiss would cost him his life.  He urges her to free them both, and they kiss.  The Prince dies, and Rusalka returns to the water forever.

Fleming goes on to say, “At the heart of Rusalka are the themes of love and redemption . . .  but one has to ‘dive’ in to find the opera’s meaning.  Rusalka swears she will not kill her love, and yet she does so with a kiss, because he begs her to.  He wants release from the shame and pain he has caused her, in the form of death.  She asks God to take his beautiful human soul and returns to her own infinite, dark existence, to the tune of one of the most beautiful postludes in the entire operatic repertoire.”

This is certainly true, but the ending has Rusalka neither dying nor going back to just being a water nymph.  She is condemned to spend eternity as a demon of the depths, emerging only to seduce men to their death.  The world of the spirit, however glittering, is too ethereal to join with the “too too solid flesh” of the human existence. 

Filed Under: News, Opera Analyses

Entire contents © 2022 by Opera Guild of Southern Arizona, Inc.

OGSA is a nonprofit corporation qualified under §501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Dues and contributions are tax-deductible  to the extent permitted by law.

Please Send Email with questions or comments on this site.

  • Home
  • FREE Opera Previews
  • Quest for the Best
  • Listen to our Singers
  • Videos about OGSA
  • Read Past Newsletters
  • Photo Gallery
  • About Us
    • Board of Directors
    • Bylaws
    • Our Supporters
  • For Students: Grants, Scholarships, Applications
    • About Grants and Scholarships
    • Grant Application
  • Opera Analyses
  • Contact Us