Rusalka, Royal Opera House, review

Aside from two wonderful concert performances in 2003, conducted by Charles Mackerras with Renee Fleming in the title-role, Dvorak’s Rusalka – first seen in Prague in the year of Queen Victoria’s death – has waited over a century to reach Covent Garden.

But if Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s production was the best that anyone could find, I think we could have waited a bit longer. Imported from the Salzburg Festival, it is a prime example of the pompous intellectualism which now dominates Eurozone theatre, and I only hope that the furious booing with which it was greeted at the curtain call means that it will be returned to sender at the earliest opportunity.

A hot-air filled programme note written by Morabito sets the tone. “The failure of mere corporeality denounces the rhetoric of a society that has severed its relationship with its Other.” Dvorak may have thought he was composing a romantic fable of a water-nymph who surrenders her voice in order to become human – a melancholy parable of the injunction to be careful what you wish for – but W&M know better.

Rather than allowing for ambiguity or poetic suggestiveness, they present an “alienating” interpretation which seeks to shock, baffle and challenge the audience without any sensitivity to the emotional mood of the score or the surface of the text. Of the glory of lake, forest and field painted by the music, of the tragedy of a love which tries and fails, there is no hint.

W&M simply use the opera as a pretext to re-cast Rusalka as a pathetic small-town brothel whore who craves suburban respectability. Girls run around in their scanties, blood is shed and it’s all quite nasty. This slick concept wears very thin very fast, and apart from the witty transformation of a huge pantomime black cat into a slinky real one, I found nothing either amusing or edifying along the way.

I would far rather expatiate on the orchestra’s impassioned playing, inspired by the gloriously lithe and sensual conducting of Yannick Nézet-Seguin. I also wish I had more space to praise Camilla Nylund’s bravely committed performance in the title-role, and the strong vocal support offered by Bryan Hymel (the Prince), Alan Held (Vodnik), Agnes Zwierko (Jezibaba) and Madeleine Pierard, Justina Gringyte and Anna Devin (wood nymphs). They all do honour to Rusalka: Wieler and Morabito just vandalise it.

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