STAGE DESIGN

The water nymph Rusalka longs above all else to become human in order to win the heart of a young prince. Yet her wish comes at a terrible price: she must sacrifice her voice, and if the prince rejects her love, both will be cursed. Faced with this fate, the little nymph must decide whether her dream is worth the ultimate sacrifice.

Rusalka is the best-known opera by the Czech Romantic composer Antonín Dvořák, written to a fairy-tale libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil. The legends of rusalkas—water sprites and dangerous nymphs from Slavic mythology—were also explored by Dvořák’s contemporaries, the celebrated Czech writers Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová. Kvapil’s libretto was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, whose plot closely resembles that of Dvořák’s opera, as well as by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine and Gerhart Hauptmann’s symbolic drama The Sunken Bell.

The dreamlike atmosphere of this “sad, modern fairy tale,” as Kvapil called it, inspired Dvořák to create a poetic and sensuous score rich in melodic invention and brilliant orchestration—from the evocative motion of the waves to the shimmering reflections of moonlight on the lake’s surface. While Rusalka contains leitmotifs reflecting Wagnerian influence, it also reveals Dvořák’s masterful use of contrast. Through entirely different expressive means, he depicts the opposing worlds of the supernatural and the human, achieving a striking contrast between the ethereal Rusalka and the passionate Princess. In this way, the composer reinforces Kvapil’s central idea: the impossibility of uniting two worlds and the tragic fate of an individual who, by leaving her own realm, is rejected by both.

Rusalka returned to the Zagreb stage exactly 99 years after its last premiere, having disappeared from the repertoire of the Zagreb Opera after the Second World War. The production is directed by the Italian opera director Caterina Panti Liberovici, with Srba Dinić as conductor.

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