Rusalka at the Met | Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
New York’s Metropolitan Opera triggered an outpouring of critical contempt this winter by reviving a traditional production of Antonin Dvorák’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka. The press’s enraged reaction to the Met’s sylvan setting starkly revealed the pressures on the house to embrace nihilistic European-style directing. But the critical bile was even more alarming as a sign of the shriveling aesthetic imagination among our purported guardians of culture.
For his eighth and final opera, Dvorák chose a libretto steeped in the rich European tradition of fairy and folk tale, genres which had long enchanted him. The young Czech poet Jaroslav Kvapil drew on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine, as well as on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Czech folklorists, to craft a tale of a beautiful water nymph who yearns to become human so as to unite with the handsome prince who swims in her forest pool. A local witch grants Rusalka her wish, but only if she give up her power of speech—a condition which proves fatal to her dream of lasting love.
Rusalka’s setting embodies two central elements of the European literary imagination: woods and water. These once-mysterious forces spawned an alternative world of mermaids, sylphs, witches, and gnomes, and gave birth to a vast artistic outpouring that includes such masterpieces of German Romanticism as Schubert’s song Der Erlkönigand his song
