Post review of Rusalka:
What a fish out of water learns from experience
John Keillor, National Post
Published: Tuesday, February 03, 2009
In opera, plot-pushing symbolism is a hit-and-miss affair, whether attempting to reveal the Masonic codes in Mozart's The Magic Flute, or playing down the disturbing theological pretensions of Wagner's Parsifal. In either case, the props and sets often allude to historical footnotes that baffle and alienate broader audiences.
Dmitri Bertman's staging of Dvorak's Rusalka for the Canadian Opera Company overcomes this problem by literally drawing a line between fantasy and reality as it plays out onstage. It begins with the sensual overture: a thin blue line, slowly rising from the bottom of the curtain to the top. Rusalka is a water-nymph who crosses over from her spirit world to ours so she can love a human prince, much like in Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Her impulsive decision has tragic implications that are illustrated with visual transitions from colourful, woodsy innocence to achromatic, civilized experience.
Set designer Hartmut Schorghofer's adaptation uses translucent screens, a water-filled pond and a huge rotating set to get these points across, which are always folding together in new, arresting ways that could hold their own as abstract visual art.
However, the first thing one will notice is how familiar Dvorak's music seems, even though Rusalka is rarely performed in Canada. The 1901 score is lyrically sumptuous and harmonically straightforward, with wind-heavy orchestration and arabesque melodies that conductor John Keenan illuminates as robustly as Bertman's realization of the setting.
And all the singing is equal to its accompaniment: Soprano Julie Makerov's Rusalka is heartbreaking as a wilful young forest spirit dazzled by the beauty of tenor Michael Schade's oblivious prince, whose black and white world is blind to hopeful supernatural lovers. Her father, baritone Richard Paul Fink's water gnome, patiently explains to her how pursuing this prince will lead to a sterile, geometric world she cannot survive in.
Undeterred, Rusalka gets help from a witch, mezzo Irina Mishura's Jezibaba, who lives in a coffin-like red arrow pointing upwards. She casts a spell to make the young sprite mortal, while warning her that if her lover is ever unfaithful to her, they will both be damned. Also, Rusalka will lose the ability to speak while in human form.
The prince finds the transformed Rusalka while hunting, and immediately falls in love with her. But soon Schade's credulous prince is getting bored of his mute wife, and the interloping Jezibaba seduces the naive aristocrat, dooming the couple.
Mishura's Jezibaba is a deliciously wicked villain, flirtatious and corrupt, singing with commanding vampiric gusto. She's the antipode to Fink's retiring phantom father character, who will only advise his daughter but never force his judgment upon her. Schade and Makerov, when their characters finally sing together, generate a romantic heat worthy of Tristan and Isolde.
But the really striking element to this emotional quagmire is how Jezibaba is not just a baddie. She is a manifestation of fate. And fate, as it turns out, is an interested party. We are all doomed to gain experience and to be deprived of our innocence. That process is painful, as Rusalka discovers when she loses her voice, her immortality and her sisters (who hate her for leaving them). She doesn't even get to keep the guy she gave everything up for, and she can't go back. Experience cannot be recanted. Jezibaba has a sinister appetite for her work, but she is not evil. She is inevitable. Her red arrow domicile points in one direction, the way fate does. That's life.
Symbols like this one accrue more and more meaning throughout the production. When Rusalka's father cautions her about impetuous love, for example, he uses a goldfish in a clear bowl to represent attraction. Later, when the prince is vulnerable to Jezibaba's advances, the set rolls back for a moment, and we see the father again, sadly pouring water out from a goldfish's bowl -- the pleasures of innocence being lost.
Bertman takes a rather simple story and injects it with Fellini-like significance that doesn't slow down the action or dampen the drama as Rusalka rides the line between purity and desire.
Many opera plots thrive on the complications surrounding love. Here, Bertman makes love subordinate to destiny. This fascinating manoeuvre constitutes a real adult theme. If you don't go to the opera because love stories are just too similar most of the time, then this is the show for you. The director is interested in how the same sort of romantic problems pass themselves on from generation to generation. Bertman allows us to view the mechanics of our eternal erotic tragedy. The fresh and seamless execution of this production makes it absolutely necessary viewing for opera veterans and newbies alike.
Globe review of Rusalka:
This fairy tale sings despite staging missteps
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
February 2, 2009
Dvorak thought of himself mainly as an opera composer, and spent the last busy decade of his life writing only for the stage. Yet many fans of his symphonies and chamber music know only one little bit from his 11 operas: Rusalka's Aria to the Moon.
Rusalka is the only Dvorak opera to have legs outside Czechoslovakia, and must have been in the long-term plans of the two Czech immigrants (Nicholas Goldschmidt and Arnold Walter) who helped found the Canadian Opera Company. Sixty years later, the opera finally arrived on the stage of the company's Four Seasons Centre.
Rusalka is a "lyric fairy tale" about a water nymph who falls in love with a princely hunter who sometimes swims in her pond. She convinces a witch (Jezibaba) to make her sufficiently human to pursue him. The transformation is not reversible, and doesn't give Rusalka the power of human speech.
That last detail is one reason why Rusalka hasn't held the stage as strongly as it might. The heroine stays mute for about half the show, and doesn't sing with her prince till the very last scene.
Nonetheless, it's well worth hearing for its rich melodic score, and even for the many echoes it contains of other fairy-tale operas by other hands. The mysterious Rusalka and her baffled boyfriend are cousins of Debussy's Mélisande and Golaud, Rusalka's sister nymphs act a lot like Rhinemaidens, and Wagnerian motifs (including a six-chord sequence I think of as the "hard truths" motif) bubble up frequently.
The COC's production, rented from Theater Erfurt in Germany, features a strong cast and a recklessly imaginative staging. Tenor Michael Schade's bright, clear tone and intelligent phrasing told us things about the Prince that his rather stolid physical presence could not. Julie Makerov was better at portraying Rusalka's fearful yearning than I would have expected after her passive turn as Donna Elvira in last fall's Don Giovanni. Her warm soprano bloomed beautifully at many crucial moments.
Mezzo-soprano Irina Mishura played Jezibaba as a powerfully sensuous creature with a voice to match. She ruled the stage whenever she appeared, and not just when she had the water gnome Vodnik (sung by the superb character baritone Richard Paul Fink) twitching at the end of her fishhook.
Yes, the witch in this production is an angler, and a schemer, and a bawd, all of which might have surprised Dvorak and librettist Jaroslav Kvapil. Director Dmitri Bertman even puts Jezibaba directly in charge of Rusalka's humiliation by the malicious Foreign Princess (dramatic soprano Joni Henson, who sounds more commanding with every appearance).
The witch's comment about the rootlessness of humankind also seems to have influenced Hartmut Schorghofer's carousel stage set, which abounded in greenery and water on one side (astutely lit by Thomas C. Hase), and put the Prince in a cold, colourless world on the other. I got very tired of this carousel during the ballet, when it made four slow pirouettes that failed to shake my belief that a ballet should include dancing.
Bertman has a way of fetishizing props (a conch shell, a white necklace, the Prince's bed) that actually limits their effectiveness as visual symbols. He's also inclined to push a good idea too far, as he did when a clever piece of staging for the Gamekeeper (tenor Michael Barrett) and Turnspit (soprano Betty Allison) became pointlessly farcical the second time round. And did we really need to have Schade blunder in and lie on his back during Rusalka's famous appeal to the moon?
Corinna Crome's costuming was austere for the Prince and chorus (black and white evening wear), wildly exuberant for almost everyone else. Jezibaba wore a sparkly crimson dress slit up to the thigh, Vodnik looked like an especially flamboyant hippie, and the three wood nymphs (Teiya Kasahara, Lisa DiMaria and Erin Fisher) were well on their way to becoming insects. Two of them descended on giant flies, surely this show's most spectacular effect.
But there were many times when I found it best to focus on the assured, lyrical sounds coming from cast, chorus and orchestra, all of which were eloquently led by conductor John Keenan. Rusalka is about giving up too much of your true self in pursuit of your dream, but these performers always held on to the best of what they had to offer, even when the dream on stage went awry.