For two reasons this
is an historic recording; the most obvious
one is its stunning cast of four principals
tailor-made for their roles, with the
seasoned Czech conductor Vaclav Neumann
at the helm. The less obvious one, and
which came to this reviewer as a complete
surprise, was that this recorded performance
was the opera’s first staging in Vienna.
Written in only seven months (April
to November 1900), the 59 year-old Dvořák
was basking in the success of his previous
opera The Devil and Kate
when Prague’s National Theatre Director
persuaded him to set this magical fairy-tale
to music. It was a huge success at its
premiere in Prague (31 March 1901),
and the composer was keen
to collaborate again with his librettist
Jaroslav Kvapil, but this was not to
be. Three years later Dvořák was
dead having written Armida
in the meantime, a failure which may
well have contributed to the breakdown
in his health. Dvořák’s operatic
output spans 34 years from 1870
(Alfred) to Armida. Most
of the operas, such as The King and
Collier (1871), The Stubborn
Lovers (1874), The Jacobin
(1889), The Devil and Kate (1899)
and Rusalka (1901) were well
received, but Vanda (1875), Dimitrij
(1881) and Armida (1904) were
relative failures. Why the ten non-operatic
years, 1889-1899, between The Jacobin,
and The Devil and Kate? The reason
is quite straightforward; Dvořák
undertook two lengthy stays in America
(teaching and conducting in New York),
and also wrote a succession of orchestral
works inspired by folk ballads, the
titles of which give a clear indication
of why the composer would then have
been attracted by the literary
essence and folk myth of Rusalka,
namely The Water Goblin, The
Noon Witch, The Golden
Spinning Wheel, and The Wild
Dove,
all of them tone poems inspired by Karel
Jaromir Erben’s collection of folk ballads
published in 1853. By 1901 Dvořák’s
mature style was noteworthy for
his own personalised thematic fingerprints,
his constantly developing use of leitmotif,
highly imaginative instrumental colour,
evocative sounds of nature, reference
to Bohemian folk music, and all enmeshed
in Romanticism and post-Wagnerian chromatic
harmony.
Rusalka proved
a wonderful vessel into which these
ingredients could be poured, starting
with three Naiads cavorting in a lake
(just like the three Rhinemaidens who
open Wagner’s Das Rheingold),
the impressionistic sounds
of a forest, and melodies and dances
derived from Czech folklore. But why
did it have to wait 86 years for a performance
in Vienna, with which Dvořák had
always had such close ties through his
association with Brahms and conductor
Hans Richter, both of whom championed
his music there to great effect? By
1901 Mahler was in charge in Vienna.
(Brahms was four years dead and Richter
had moved to Manchester to take over
the Hallé Orchestra) and made
plans for the opera’s staging there
in 1902. The four principals were cast,
Berta Foerster-Lauterer as Rusalka,
Marie Gutheil-Schroder as the Foreign
Princess, Leo Slezak as the Prince,
and Wilhelm Hesch as the Water Goblin,
and it was the last-named who fell ill
a month before the opening night in
March 1902. Mahler promised that this
meant only a postponement to the following
season, not a change of heart, but nevertheless
the plan came to naught for reasons
which remain a mystery to this day.
It was all the more surprising considering
that the work had already received over
1500 performances in neighbouring Prague,
and so must have been viewed by the
Vienna Opera’s management as a money-making
prospect.
Rusalka is a water
sprite who has fallen in love with a
human being, a Prince who regularly
bathes in her lake. She now longs to
become human so that she can feel the
physical and emotional power of love.
Despite warnings from the Water Goblin
of the inevitable outcome of her intent,
and having voiced her feelings in the
famous Song to the Moon, she
turns to the only one who can fulfil
her wish, the Old Witch Jezibaba, and
hears of the conditions attached to
her demands. As soon as she becomes
human she will lose her voice and, if
deceived by her lover, she will be condemned
to wander the earth as a will o’ the
wisp bringing death to men while he
would be dragged to the bottom of the
lake. Sure of his love, however, Rusalka
accepts these conditions and undergoes
transformation, after which the Prince,
out hunting, comes upon her and takes
her to wed at his castle. Sure enough
the idyll is soured by Rusalka’s lack
of speech and by the presence of a foreign
Princess intent on luring the Prince
away from his bride-to-be by her own
charms, and to whom he succumbs. The
distraught Rusalka returns to her lake
and encounters the Water Goblin, and
her profound sorrow enables her to speak
once again but he is unable to comfort
her. A last attempt to win back the
Prince’s love ends once more in rejection,
the Water Goblin curses the young man
for his faithlessness, and a sudden
change of heart at the realisation of
what he has done ends with his rejection
by the Princess. In the final act, the
couple’s fate comes to pass. Rusalka
might yet have saved herself as Jezibaba
reveals that she could return to her
water sprite existence if she kills
the Prince with a dagger, but this she
cannot do. At night the Prince, desperate
to make amends, comes to the lakeside,
where the two former lovers meet. He
dies in her fateful embrace sealed with
a kiss, after which she sinks down into
the lake.
As stated at the outset
of this review, this is a star-studded
cast. Benackova is ideally suited to
the heroine’s role using her considerable
vocal powers in a wide-ranging kaleidoscope
of emotion and tonal colour, from the
tenderness of sprite-like innocence
to the full-blooded power of human passion.
Randova’s insistence on singing both
roles of Jezibaba and the Foreign Princess
is akin to singing the children’s Mother
and the Witch in Humperdinck’s Hansel
and Gretel, but without any psychological
or dramatic justification for taking
such a decision. On the other hand the
Princess is only in the second act while
Jezibaba appears in the first and third,
and as we get to hear more of her imposingly
glorious voice as a result, it’s no
bad thing. Nesterenko’s dark-hued Bolshoi
bass with his continual, woeful cry
of Bĕda (sadness) and Dvorsky’s
ringing tenor make this glorious quartet
worth its weight in vocal gold. There
are cuts, in two instances substantial
enough to the extent of completely excising
the small roles of the old, gossipy
Gamekeeper and the young scullery boy
in acts two and three. These were probably
made not only to sustain the dramatic
focus solely on the principal characters
but also to keep within the production
budget in this first season under the
Intendanz of Claus Helmut Drese and
the musical directorship of Claudio
Abbado. After opening with Penderecki’s
Die schwarze Maske, Rusalka
was the fourth new production in that
glorious season of 1986/1987 after Verdi’s
Ballo in maschera (with Price
and Pavarotti), Massenet’s Werther
(Baltsa, Carreras, Colin Davis), and
Mozart’s Idomeneo under Harnoncourt
making his debut. The season continued
with other new productions, Otello
(Domingo and Mehta), Schubert’s Fierrabras
(Abbado), and finally Berg’s Wozzeck
(Behrens, Grundheber and Abbado), all
of them interwoven among the house repertoire
of the day. Neumann was unrivalled in
his deep understanding of his homeland’s
late-Romantic idiom, and, in a noble
interpretation, inspires his Viennese
players to Bohemian heights they had
probably never visited before. The dances
are complete (Vienna has a fine ballet),
the little chorus there regrettably
has a verse of the processional march
cut in act two, but these are tiny niggles.
One cannot get away from the fact that
it is a glorious experience to re-live
such a memorable evening as that of
10 April 1987.
Christopher Fifield
Chorus and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera/Vaclav
Neumann 