Rusalka, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 4 February 2024

Rusalka – Christiane Karg
Prince – Pavel Černoch
Foreign Princess – Anna Samuil
Vodník – Mika Kares
Ježibaba – Anna Kissjudit
Gamekeeper – Adam Kutny
Kitchen Boy – Clara Nadeshdin
Nymphs – Regina Koncz, Rebecka Wallroth, Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein
Huntsman – Taehan Kim

Director – Kornél Mundruczó
Designs – Monika Pormale
Lighting – Felice Ross
Video – Rūdolfs Baltiņš
Choreography - Candaş Baş
Dramaturgy – Kata Wéber, Christoph Lang

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Images:  Gianmarco Bresadola
Rusalka (Christiane Karg)

Director Kornél Mundruczó comes like a breath of fresh air to unsettle our conceptions of Dvořák’s penultimate and, by some way, greatest opera and thus to do precisely what the material demands; or rather, it comes as something bitterly stale, menacing, even poisonous to accomplish what fresh air on its own might not be able. It is certainly refreshing, though it should not be, to have a production that takes class seriously as a form of social distinction, a social barrier, though ultimately it will go beyond that, re-engaging with the opera in all its strange tragedy and tragic strangeness. By grounding itself in the here and now, but also a here and now our society largely wishes to ignore, it challenges, but it challenges further and with brilliant theatricality by the course subsequently taken. 

Rusalka – not strictly her ‘name’, but it is all we have, and ‘the rusalka’ or even ‘the sprite’ would seem unduly pedantic – lives in a shared, ground-floor Berlin apartment, a WG or Wohngemeinschaft, her flatmates the other three nymphs and Vodník (if you prefer, the Watergoblin). She does not fit in with, or has grown distant from, her female flatmates at least; they are so much more laid back, fun-loving, quite happy in their less-than-ideal home of disrepair. Theirs is a working class, it seems, the bourgeoisie simply cannot stomach, however much it might claim to act in its name. But nor, any more, can Rusalka, at least since she has seen signs of the life – above all, the Prince – upstairs. In his modern penthouse with balcony and views across the city including, yet far from restricted to the Fernsehturm and the Rotes Rathaus, he and his appallingly grotesque group of friends, the Foreign Princess (his ex-) included, have ‘made it’. They know each other inside and out, as it were; they probably even vote Green. 

Rusalka, Prince (Pavel Černoch), Gamekeeper (Adam Kutny),
Kitchen Boy (Clara Nadeshdin), and Ensemble

One can see why she would like to escape to that other world, embodied in an attractive, trendily dressed mysterious (to her, though not to us) stranger. For one thing, other than the drugs that may or may not be Ježibaba’s stock-in-trade (what is that fascinatingly beyond-good-and-evil or just-plain-evil neighbour doing?) she is hardly spoilt for choice in alternative paths. Needless to say, an actually existing working-class young woman is the most shocking sight of all to the Prince’s friends and they work immediately to exclude her, the Foreign Princess going all out to rekindle those embers until the culpably weak yet more sympathetic Prince succumbs. No wonder the two sides cannot communicate, at least not until it is too late. For it is important to recognise that Rusalka fits in on neither side of this social divide. She only discovers – and this is entirely faithful to the work – where she might have done far too late. There is, again as in the work, a sort of tragic communion in that the Prince realises too late; he can only do what is right (for him, as much as ethically) by surrendering his life, which, movingly he does. 

In a programme interview, Mundruczó says he kept thinking of Kafka when working on the opera: doubtless a surprising reference for some of us, the Prague connection, albeit intergenerational, notwithstanding. But that may be to fall for outdated ‘national’ histories of music. Why not, after all? It certainly comes into his own in the third act here, where the action transfers less to a house than a cellar of horrors. Having returned to Ježibaba, been scorned and perhaps even poisoned, Rusalka leaves behind the world of social realism in which we imagined we should remain until the end and morphs into an impossible creature, part human, part goodness knows what, although it is perhaps not coincidental that its black suggests the colour of refuse and its disposal. One can and perhaps should read that in social and environmental ways; after all, what could be more of a social issue, what could hit the working class harder, than the destruction of the planet? But the aesthetic is actually quite different; one can read it for ‘meaning’ in that way, but the vision seems to lie beyond that: something spellbinding, from which one wishes to avert one’s eyes in horror at the agony Rusalka is experiencing, yet cannot. It is more filmic than theatrically Gothic, I think, but that choice seems a deliberate decision, again, judging from the interview, to attempt to reach younger audiences with different frames of reference. Whatever one might think of that – I am not sure I am the target audience here – for me it works. It truly unsettles and actually leads us to reconsider clashes between ‘natural’ and ‘human’, or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds very much as the work does—yet which can become lost if the setting is too folk-like. A sort of deformed, already-dead tree-in-plastic has grown, suffocating and perhaps literally trashing all that approach it.

Rusalka, Prince, Third Nymph (Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein)

Fairy tales, told properly, are dark, even sick, not through a sort of tired, bourgeois exhibitionism – that might be better left upstairs in the deceased Prince’s apartment – but because they tell of dreams, fantasies, delights, and horrors. They are not of the sanitised, commercial world of Disney, but come from a place of sex, violence, and more. The mirror they hold up is truthful because it is distorted, not despite that distortion. This production recognises such twisted truths and turns them into a drama at least implicit in Dvořák’s –and Jaroslav Kvapil’s – work and world. It may predate Freud and Kafka, but it is not without connections and even presentiments. I have nothing at all against a production presenting a single-minded view of a work, incorporating more current concerns, and so on. The work, whatever it may be, will survive. But a particular point of interest here is that the director does not impose a framework, even a related conceptual framework, on the work, but rather presents such a related framework as a way in to experience or re-experience the very strangeness of the work ‘itself’. 

For Dvořák progresses in this score too; even in so late a work as this, written after (!) Pelléas et Mélisande, he does not rest on his laurels. If those laurels are too folk-like for some early on – their loss, but there is no accounting for taste – then they surely will not be by the third act. For me, conductor Robin Ticciati and the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin came truly into their own in this act, opening up a range of post-Wagnerian language and emotion, not just or even principally emotion, extending beyond what I have heard from Ticciati previously (save, perhaps, at Glyndebourne for the dramaturgically unfortunate Ethel Smyth opera, The Wreckers). Not that there was anything wrong with what he did earlier. I initially found it a bit hard-driven, but came to realise that this was probably as much a reading developed in tandem with the production as a conception ‘in itself’ of the score. Lack of what might be thought of as sentimentality – not necessarily so, but that is arguably another matter – was the point. It was not cold, but nor was it a kitsch (or readable as such) tale of forest life. 

Rusalka, Ježibaba (Anna Kissjudit)

The same might be said of performances from an excellent cast, only more so, for there was some singing of ravishing warmth—but not only of that. Making her role debut, Christiane Karg not only traced the journey(s) proposed by composer, librettist, conductor, director, and more; she was instrumental in creating them. Occasionally during the first act, I wondered whether she might be a little under-powered, and perhaps there were a few first-night nerves there, but this was more, I think, a matter of wise marshalling of resources and dramatic trajectory. In many ways, I liked the way the Song to the Moon did not become a stand-alone aria and indeed related strongly to the music surrounding it, but I can well imagine some not having done so. Whatever one’s position on that – mostly a matter of personal preference – this Rusalka grew in stature through shocking experience, a tragic heroine to remember for the denouement. 

There was tremendous acting on her part too. Pavel Černoch’s Prince was similarly, if differently, involving. Despite it all, and partly on account of twin vocal intelligence and beauty, one could not help but like him, and again shared his ultimate tragedy at the close. Mika Kares’s Vodník also grew as his character – and the truth that character told – increasingly gained our sympathy. Anna Samuil offered glamour and refulgence – just the thing – for the Foreign Princess. Anna Kissjudit’s already horrible Ježibaba became all the more splendidly, horrifyingly so on her return, just as the production demanded, without sacrifice to more ‘traditional’ vocal values. Smaller roles and choral parts were all well taken, all contributing to a greater musicodramatic whole. 

As for the audience member who not only booed the end of the first act, but through his failure to stop – I am trying to be polite – seemed determine to prevent the second from beginning, what part of that whole troubled him so much? And why?

Rusalka, Opéra national de Paris, 29 January 2019

Opéra Bastille

Prince (Klaus Florian Vogt), Foreign Princess (Karita Mattila), Rusalka (Camilla Nylund)
Images: Guergana Damianova /Opéra national de Paris

Prince – Klaus Florian Vogt

Foreign Princess – Karita Mattila

Rusalka – Camilla Nylund

Vodník – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Ježibaba – Michelle DeYoung

Huntsman’s Voice – Danylo Matviienko

Kitchen Boy – Jeanne Ireland

Nymphs – Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain

Gamekeeper – Tomasz Kumiega

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)

Michael Levine (designs)

Peter van Praet (lighting)

Philippe Giraudeau (choreography)

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro di Stefano)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

And so, the third and final opera from my long weekend in Paris: Dvořák’s Rusalka. Whilst the first two, Il primo omicidio (an oratorio, albeit staged) and Les Troyens, garnered their principal interest from their respective productions and, in the latter case, singing too, Rusalka, once over a problematical first act, offered largely musical riches and little enlightenment from the director. To be fair, Robert Carsen’s production is old, dating from 2002. Age, however, does not really seem to be the problem. It does not look tired; indeed, it looks ‘stylish’, ‘beautiful’, etc., fresh too, so that it might have been premiered today; it just does not seem to have anything particular to say.

Rusalka

It is not exactly ‘traditional’, although it is difficult to imagine ‘traditionalists’ minding it, their ideology and practice often proving not quite so consonant as they imagine. Indeed, so long as ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ designs are present, they are unlikely to notice a Konzept one way or another. Credit where credit is due: Michael Levine’s designs and the lighting from Praet and Carsen himself are splendidly realised. If you like large, ultra-minimalist hotel bedrooms, furnished in exquisite silk and satin – or fabric that resembles them from afar – you may be happy. (I should happily stay in one, but that is a different matter.) There is a coup de theatre, a literally blinding flash of fire, at the moment of fateful transformation; it promises a great deal, yet alas, that is that. What instead we have is an oh-so-elegant paddling pool as the setting for the first act; in the second, the bed that has been suspended in the air find itself in that hotel room, reflected in a mirror image. Ježibaba install herself in that bed, newly suspended in mid-air for the third, with the return of water perhaps – if we are to be charitable – also suggesting a visual dissolution of themes; that scene is followed by a return to the hotel room, after which presumably the Prince and Rusalka will die – or perhaps not. Is that a directorial twist, a feminist criticism? Perhaps, although it does not seem to be presented as such. It seems more a matter of simply not listening to either words or music, without actively attempting to criticise them.  


There are likewise mild, ‘stylish’ confusions in the second act. What to make of that mirror image (until someone neglected to replicate a gesture, presumably by accident rather than on purpose)? I assume it was intended as a play on the bifurcation of human and spirit world, yet the placing of different characters, the Foreign Princess and Rusalka dressed identically, seems merely arbitrary in that respect. Is the lack of sense the point? It could be might be; again it does not seem to be. Much of this could readily contribute to something more interesting; it is a genuine pity that it does not, remaining more at the level of opera as a ‘luxury product’ that barely registers as drama. If, for instance, at ENO, you favoured Carsen’s similarly ‘beautiful’ Midsummmer Night’s Dream, with a not dissimilar bed centre-stage, to Christopher Alden’s gripping piece of theatre with the same work, this will certainly be for you. By contrast, Barrie Kosky’s brilliant production for Berlin’s Komische Oper truly penetrates to the dramatic heart, in more than one way, of the work.

Nymphs (Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain), Rusalka

As a framework for fine musical and indeed stage performances, the production nevertheless worked well. Susanna Mälkki started fitfully, rendering the first act somewhat puzzling. However, in the second and third acts, she came increasingly into her own, drawing a variety of tone and phrasing, not to mention formal dynamism, seemingly unimagined by Philippe Jordan the previous night in Les Troyens. For her, the third act was undoubtedly the climax, motivic development truly working itself out horizontally and vertically in ways that Brahms and Schoenberg would surely have admired.

Foreign Princess and Prince

Mälkki’s two compatriots onstage proved outstanding throughout, Camilla Nylund offering an unfailingly differentiated performance equally attentive to the needs of words and music. Nothing was taken for granted; everything sounded – and looked – fresh. Karita Mattila announced undefinable, unmistakeable star quality as soon as she strode on stage as the Foreign Princess. One was left in little doubt whose musical wiles would win out, at least in the here and now. It was interesting to hear voices one ‘knew’ from Wagner, moreover, in this music, not at all inappropriately. Michelle DeYoung proved a formidable Ježibaba in every way. Thomas Johannes Mayer and Klaus Florian Vogt are known quantities. The former impressed once again, rather as a Wanderer on location; whether one ‘likes’ the latter is largely a matter of taste, though I shall admit to feeling that that once ethereal – if highly controversial – Lohengrin voice wears somewhat thin nowadays. All other parts were taken with great musical and dramatic skill, the three nymphs, Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain, worthy of especial mention.

Rusalka, Komische Oper, 30 October 2016

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Rusalka (Nadja Mchantaf), Ježibaba (Nadine Weissmann), and her son (Marcus Wagner)

(sung in German)

Rusalka – Nadja Mchantaf

Prince – Timothy Richards

Ježibaba – Nadine Weissmann
Vodník – Jens-Erik Aasbø
Foreign Princess – Karolina Gumos
Gamekeeper – Ivan Turšić
Kitchen Boy – Christiane Oertel
First Wood Nymph – Annika Gerhards
Second Wood Nymph – Maria Fiselier
Third Wood Nymph – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
Huntsman –Johannes Dunz
Ježibaba’s Son – Marcus Wagner

Barrie Kosky (director)

Anisha Bondy (revival director)
Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Bettina Auer (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Henrik Nánási (conductor)

Prince (Timothy Richards), Rusalka, and Foreign Princess (Karolina Gumos)

 

I shall not beat about the bush: this was just what opera should be. It convinced this sceptic that a repertoire system can not only work, but work uncommonly well. Barrie Kosky’s intelligent, thoughtful production, Henrik Nánási’s similarly intelligent conducting of the excellent Komische Oper orchestra, and a splendid cast (with a true star, in the best rather than the ‘celebrity’ sense, in the title role) combined to enchant, to challenge, and to move. There is an openness to the production and performance typical of so much of the best opera at the moment

It is only a certain class of reactionary adults who will refer to something as ‘just’ being a fairy tale. Children and thoughtful adults know that the world of the fairy tale is dark indeed. (And yet, the number of anodyne productions of Hänsel und Gretel the world must suffer continues to grow! Thank goodness for bold exceptions, such as that of Liam Steel earlier this year, for the Royal College of Music.) Look closely, or even just permit yourself to be receptive, and you will find that it is all there: sex, violence, sorrow, tragedy. The Grimm Brothers and other collectors were not interested in an adult’s sentimental creation of ‘childhood’. Nor, however, were they out to shock. They did their collecting, their editing; they certainly were not passive. But they wanted to let the tales speak in some sense – however illusory this idea may be as an ‘absolute’ – ‘for themselves’. So, I think, does Kosky here, mediated, as it most likely must be, via the nineteenth century, in which the opera was (just!) written, and of course by what has happened since. Indeed, an interview with Kosky and Patrick Lange – the conductor, I presume, when the production was new, in 2012 – opens with Kosky declaring: ‘Rusalka muss ein Märchen sein!’ (‘Rusalka must be a fairy tale.’)

 

And so, without danger of prettification or ‘mere’ folklore or folklorism, the story is, with great strength, quite without varnish, placed centre stage, literally and figuratively. Klaus Grünberg’s set design unfussily suggests the Komische Oper’s interior itself; we are all staging, after all, not least those of us in the audience. The cold elegance, moreover, of the late Victorian wall and, crucially, door – that is where, even how, things change, the action moves on – is all the framing we really need. We concentrate on the wood nymph herself and her plight. Above all, her mermaid’s tail, with which she struggles in such heart-rending fashion, leaving her desperate to become ‘human’, only for matters to become worse when she does, sears itself into the memory, as does the fish skeleton that emerges from within following the shocking butchery of the witch, Ježibaba. A (Danse) macabre convention of skeletons, spirits of death, and so on we see in the third act (of the opera ‘itself’, for here, we have only one interval) chills without undue grotesquerie; all is very much in the spirit of a fairy tale that is anything but ‘mere’. (There is no literalist river by the meadow here, but there is water, which, when we see, even feel, it, thereby makes its point all the more clearly.) The subconscious is clearly at work, but never in laboured, didactic fashion. That, after all, is not the way of the subconscious. And we make what we will of it; that, after all, is its way.

 

At the heart, in more ways than one, of the performance was Nadja Mchantaf’s superlative performance as Rusalka. She captured, in gorgeous, never self-regarding, vocal tone, the longing, the dreaming, the sadness, the heartbreak. Her stage presence, again entirely at the service of the drama, was second to none. One could read into her frustration as much – or as little – more as one wished, or rather as one’s subconscious wished. Mchantaf’s ability to capture ‘girlish’ sweetness, not necessarily unalloyed, and desire, indeed desperation, for something more will linger long in my memory. Rusalka’s unknowing imitation of the Foreign Princess’s knowing sexual advances upon the Prince were perhaps saddest of all. Karolina Gumos herself brought old-style glamour to a stage-stopping performance as the Princess, seductive in voice as well as in her shameless yet never inelegant display. Timothy Richards’s honestly perplexed performance as the Prince occasionally edged towards vocal strain, but never excessively so. Jens-Erik Aasbø brought a sense of the deeply, sternly primæval to Vodník, the Water Goblin, lamenting Rusalka’s fate, refusing to grant her false hope. Nadine Weissmann, Frank Castorf’s Erda, was perhaps always going to court that comparison, especially when singing this opera in German, but I was just as interested to hear how the role differed; her malevolence and yet also her personal, hinted-at tragedy shone through with what was, I think, the blackest of humour. Kosky’s conception of both goblin and witch as mediators between two irreconcilable (dream?) worlds was in excellent hands – and voices. There were no weak links, and a true sense of old-fashioned – in the best sense – company lifted every contribution. One final mention should go to the splendid trio of Wood Nymphs, Rhinemaidens in the making – or is it the other way around?

 

Nánási’s conducting traced the ebb and flow of Dvořak’s score very well. Opening in perhaps more formalistic fashion – not at all inappropriately so – this reading acquired impetus, even aqueous dissolution, of its own, rather as if the composer were ‘progressing’ from something more Schumannesque to the world of Tristan. In a sense he is, and one can certainly here proximity in some of the later harmonies. The orchestra and chorus glistened and glowered, equal partners – at least – in a drama more compelling still than most of Dvořak’s symphonies. Lange, in that interview, actually drew comparisons with Mahler, and compared the opera to ‘eine gensungene Sinfonie’. Nánási seemed very much to follow in his footsteps, St Anthony’s preaching to the Mahlerian fishes as ever going (tragically) unheeded.

 

Prohaska/Schneider - Song of the Sirens, 4 March 2012

Wigmore Hall

Debussy – La Mer est plus belle
Haydn – The Mermaid’s Song, Hob.XXVIa/25
Lawes – Slide soft, you silver floods
Schubert – Der Fischer, D 225
Am See, D 746

Szymanowski – Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess, op.31: ‘Song of the Waves’ and ‘Dance’

Mahler – Phantasie aus Don Juan
Wolf – Nixe Binsefuss
Schumann – Die Meerfee, op.125 no.1
Mendelssohn – Schilflied, op.71 no.4
Schubert – Des Fischers Liebesglück, D 933
Fauré – La Fleur qui va sur l’eau, op.85 no.2
Honegger – Trois Chansons de la Petite Sirènes, H 63 : ‘Chanson des Sirènes’ and ‘Berceuses de la sirène’
Dowland – Sorrow, stay, lend true repentant tears
Dvořák – Rusalka: Song to the Moon


Wigmore Hall debuts do not come much more impressive than this: a beautifully programmed ‘Song of the Sirens’ from Anna Prohaska, splendidly partnered by her regular pianist, Eric Schneider, in which the soprano’s heavy cold could happily be written off. (One really would never have known.) Not only were we treated to a stunning variety of works, whether considered in terms of language, style, or chronology, that variety proved to be the flip side of the coin to as impeccably selected and intelligently ordered a survey of the siren in song as could be imagined. Fortunately, one did not have to imagine, for a mere hour in the stalls took us from Debussy to Dvořák via Haydn, Schubert, Szymanowski, Honegger, Dowland, and many others.

It was Schneider who announced himself first in Debussy’s 1891 Verlaine setting, La Mer reste plus belle. His announcement was vigorous rather than pastel, much to the sea’s – and to Debussy’s – benefit. The same could be said of Prohaska’s voice, richer in timbre than one might expect from a high soprano: again much to the benefit of the music, and with excellent French (often, alas, a problem with singers). ‘Un soufflé ami hante la vague, et nous chante: “Vous sans espérance, mourez sans souffrance!"’ The first but far from last of our siren calls proved ravishingly sensuous. ‘Plus belle que tous, meilleure que nous!’ Who could resist? Haydn’s Mermaid Song was playful, yet seductive in its own way. The change of language – this is one of the composer’s English canzonettas for Anne Hunter, still far too little known – posed no more problem than any subsequent shift. Echoes of earlier eighteenth-century English style – Handel and Arne, perhaps – were certainly present, providing a winning link to the earlier, more serious English writing of Henry Lawes, in his lute song, Slide soft, you silver floods. The performance from both artists was not only stylish, but more importantly, highly alert to the composer’s harmonic shifts and their implications. It is perhaps inevitable that with hindsight one would think of Purcell. Two Schubert songs followed. The insouciance of Der Fischer nicely set up the dissolution of any easy opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’. Who, after all, is a siren? And for whom is she whatever we might think she is? Goethe’s voice, moreover, shone through, the sheer quality of his verse relished in its rendition. Am See conveyed a sense of the metaphysical without any need for portentous exaggeration; it was all the more powerful for that.

The ‘Song of the Waves’ (‘Pieśń o fali’) and ‘Dance’ (‘Taniec’) from Szymanowski’s Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess were especially welcome, both for their inclusion – what wonderful songs these are, and how rarely we hear him – and for the manner of their performance, imperceptible union of eroticism and exoticism combining in a properly Szymanowskian magic carpet, harking back to the Debussy of the first song, to be sure, but the composer’s personal voice unmistakeably present. We stood close to the world of King Roger, and rightly so. Prohaska presented a combination of Carmen, Zerbinetta, and Stravinsky’s Nightingale, in ‘Dance’, and above all, seemed both to experience and to enjoy both music and text. Schneider navigated the difficult piano part with ease, teasing out the inviting ambiguities of Szymanowski’s harmonies. Already a noted Zerlina (Salzburg and La Scala, the latter under Daniel Barenboim), Prohaska then turned to a very different Don Juan fantasy, that of Mahler – although, of course, Da Ponte’s predecessor, Tirso de Molina is the writer. It is a tribute to both artists, as well of course as to Mahler himself, that the composer’s own voice, even in a song from the early 1880s, should sing out so clearly. His bitter irony is present even here, emerging from the magical world of Das klagende Lied. Haunting indeed, not least in terms of Schneider’s voicing of Mahler’s harmonic language. Wolf’s Nixe Binsefuss was properly sprite-like, capricious and not without menace, leading into a rare opportunity to hear one of Schumann’s late songs, Die Meerfee, the performance at one with the composer’s deceptive ‘simplicity’. Mendelssohn’s Schilflied, a setting of Nikolaus Lenau, not only benefited from a sense of the metaphysical, reminding us of the earlier Schubert Am See; it also showed that Prohaska, even when indisposed, could sustain a long line, musical as well as verbal virtues to the fore.

The last of the three Schubert songs featured was Des Fischers Liebesglück. Prohaska and Schneider rightly took their time, imparting a dolorous sense of longing that long haunted the imagination. Schneider’s voicing of apparent simplicity enabled detail, both in his and the vocal part, truly to stand in relief. Again, one wondered, what is reality? Should we even care, when we might more profitably, or at least pleasurably, be ensnared? Fauré’s La Fleur qui va sur l’eau showed a more tempestuous side to the composer than one often hears, both artists displaying a fine sense of dramatic narrative and metaphor. It was a delight thereafter to sample two – alas, only two – of Honegger’s 1926 Trois Chansons de la Petite Sirène, ‘Chanson des Sirènes’ perfectly placed in the programme to have one relish its relative harmonic astringency. It brought in its wake a real sense of dissolution in the waves and ultimately of the siren’s unanswerable call. ‘Berceuse de la sirène’ thereafter allowed one to luxuriate in its dangerous lullaby. Dowland’s Sorrow, stay, lend true repentant tears not only reminded one of Prohaska’s roots in early music, but crucially distilled the essence of one of our most extraordinary song-writers: sorrow, despair, and of course, melancholy. The falling ‘down’ and ‘down’ truly tugged at the heart-strings. So, in its different way, did the operatic climax, the ‘Song of the Moon’ from Rusalka, at present receiving its first staging at Covent Garden. (Prohaska sang in that production’s first outing, at the Salzburg Festival in 2008.) Once again, musical and dramatic gifts were united, in a reading poignant to a degree, a fitting finale to a fine recital, rounded off with a delightfully ambiguous encore of Wolf’s Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens.


See also the review on Classical Iconoclast.

Rusalka, Royal Opera, 27 February 2012

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Nymphs and Rusalka (Camilla Nylund)
Images: Royal Opera/Clive Barda

Rusalka – Camilla Nylund
Foreign Princess – Petra Lang
Prince – Bryan Hymel
Ježibaba – Agnes Zwierko
Vodník – Alan Held
Huntsman – Daniel Grice
Gamekeeper – Gyula Orendt
Kitchen Boy – Ilse Eerens
Wood Nymphs – Anna Devin, Justina Gringyte, Madeleine Pierard
Mourek – Claire Talbot

Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito (directors)
Samantha Seymour (revival director)
Barbara Ehnes (set designs)
Anja Rabes (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Chris Kondek (video designs)
Altea Garrido (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Yannick Nézet-Seguin (conductor)


It is a truth universally acknowledged that an interesting opera production will be met with incomprehension and lazy, philistine hostility by vast swathes of the audience in many, perhaps most, of the world’s ‘major’ houses, a truth that renders one all the more grateful for the Royal Opera showing the courage to stage this new – to London – production of Rusalka. That is not to say that any production meeting with hostility qualifies as interesting; some, of course, are simply not very good, or worse. Yet, it seems that only the most vapid, unchallenging – and yes, I realise that the word ‘challenging’ is a red rag to self-appointed ‘traditionalist’ bulls – of productions will garner approval from the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie. The boorish behaviour of those who booed this Rusalka equates more or less precisely to the sort of antics they would condemn if they occurred on the street – the work of ‘hoodlums’, the ‘lower classes’, the ‘uneducated’, ‘rioters’, ‘immigrants’, et al. – yet somehow unwillingness or inability to think, the fascistic refusal to consider an alternative point of view, the threat of mob violence, becomes perfectly acceptable when one has paid the asking price for what they consider to be their rightful ‘entertainment’. They would no more bother to understand, to explore, to question, Rusalka were it depicted in the most ’traditional’ of fashions, of course, but they explode at the mere suggestion that a work and a performance might ask something of them. For, as John Stuart Mill famously noted, ‘Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.’ Wagner’s ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ – ‘emotionalisation’, not abdication! – remains as foreign a country to them as it did to the Jockey Club thugs who prevented Tannhäuser from being performed in Paris; at least one might claim that the latter were having to deal with challenging ‘new music’, Zukunftsmuik, even. Here they were faced with an opera by Dvořák, first performed in 1901, in a staging that would barely raise an eyebrow in most German house or festivals. (The production, by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, hails initially from the Salzburg Festival.) It would be interesting to know how many of those booing had selfishly, uncomprehendingly disrupted a recent Marriage of Figaro in the same house by erupting into laughter at the very moment Count Almaviva sought forgiveness from the Countess. (There was also, bizarrely, to be heard at the opening of the third act a shouted call from a member of the audience for a ‘free’ Quebec.)

Rusalka, Prince (Bryan Hymel), and Foreign Princess (Petra Lang)

What, then, was it that incurred the wrath of the Tunbridge Wells beau monde? I can only assume that it was for the most part Barbara Ehnes’s sets, since the stage direction (presumably a good part of it from revival director, Samantha Seymour) was more often that not quite in harmony with the urgings and suggestions of Dvořák’s score. (The hostile rarely if ever listen to the music; at best, they follow the surtitles and bridle at deviations from what they imagine the stage directions might have been.) Even modern dress is mixed with a sense of the magical, the environment of Ježibaba the witch a case in point. There is even a cat, played both in giant form by Claire Talbot, and in real form, by – a cat, ‘Girlie’. What is real, and what is not? Collision between spirit and human worlds is compellingly brought to life, the devils and demons of a heathen past, including Slavonic river spirits (rusalki) come to tempt, to question, to lay bare the delusions of moralistic, bigoted modernity. Just as modern ‘love’ and marriage’ quickly boil down to money and power, so Vodník the water goblin finds his tawdry place of temptation whilst issuing his moralistic warnings. (Did the audience see itself reflected in the mirror? Perhaps, though I doubt that it even bothered to think that far.) Our ideas of Nature having been hopelessly compromised by what we have become, we ‘naturally’ see the world of rusalki from within the comforts of our hypocritical bordello. Who is exploiting whom, and who is ‘impure’? The souls of women who have committed suicide and of stillborn children – there are various accounts of who the rusalki actually are – or those who shun them in life and in death? Wieler and Morabito do not offer agitprop; rather they allow us to ask these questions of the work, and of ourselves. But equally importantly, they permit a sense of wonder to suffuse what remains very much a fairy tale, realism coexisting with, being corrected by, something older, more mysterious, more dangerous, and perhaps ultimately liberating. Chris Kondek’s video designs, not unlike the hydroelectric dam of Patrice Chéreau’s ‘Centenary’ Ring, both suggest Nature and through their necessary technological apparatus remind us of our distance from any supposed ‘Golden Age’, just as the opening scene will inevitably suggest to us Alberich, the Rhinemaidens, and the power of the erotic. (Wagner used the term liebesgelüste.)

Musical performances were equally strong, in many respects signalling a triumph for Covent Garden. First and foremost should be mentioned Yannick Nézet-Séguin, making his Royal Opera debut. The orchestra played for him as if for an old friend, offering a luscious, long-breathed Romanticism that made it sound a match – as, on its best days, it is – for any orchestra in the world. Magic was certainly to be heard: the sound of Dvořák’s harps again took me back to Das Rheingold – and to Bernard Haitink’s tenure at the house. Ominous fate was brought into being with similar conviction and communicative skill. Above all, Nézet-Séguin conveyed both a necessary sense of direction and a love for the score’s particular glories. If there are times when Dvořák might benefit from a little more, at least, of Janáček’s extraordinary dramatic concision, it would take a harder heart than mine to eschew the luxuriance on offer both in score and performance. Crucially, staging and performance interacted so that the contrast between worlds on stage intensified that in the pit, and vice versa.

Ježibaba (Agnes Zwierko)
and her cat, Mourek (Claire Talbot)

Camilla Nylund shone in the title role. At times, especially during the first act, one might have wondered whether her voice would prove to have the necessary heft, but it did, and Nylund proved herself an accomplished actress into the bargain. Bryan Hymel may not be the most exciting of singers; the voice is not especially variegated. However, he proved dependable, and often a great deal more, the final duet as moving as one could reasonably expect. Alan Held was everything a Vodník should be: baleful, threatening, sincere, and yet perhaps not quite. The Spirit of the Lake may well have his own agenda – and certainly did here. Agnes Zwierko played the witch Ježibaba with wit, menace, and a fine sense of hypocrisy that brought the closed environments of Janáček’s dramas to mind. The four Jette Parker Young Artists participating, nymphs Anna Devin, Madeleine Perard, and Justina Gringyte, and Huntsman Daniel Grice all acquitted themselves with glowing colours. Indeed, Grice’s solo, enveloped by miraculous Freischütz-like horns from the orchestra, movingly evoked a world of lost or never-existent woodland innocence. Last but not least, Petra Lang’s Foreign Princess emerged, like Wagner’s Ortrud, as in some respects the most truthful, as well as the most devious, character of all. Splendidly sung and acted, Lang’s was a performance truly to savour. But then, this was a performance as a whole that was far more than the sum of its parts, a triumphant return to form for Covent Garden with its first ever staging of the work.