Yesterday afternoon one of the KQED channels offered a Metropolitan Opera rebroadcast of a Great Performances at the Met program, which was first aired on June 18, 2017. The opera was Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 114 Rusalka, which was originally presented by The Met: Live in HD on February 25 of the same year. The title role was sung by soprano Kristine Opolais, who had built a reputation around the role and was performing it at the Met for the first time.
By way of context, San Francisco Opera (SFO) has presented only two productions of this opera. The first had its first performance in November of 1995 with staging by Günther Schneider-Siemsen and Charles Mackeras conducting. The second was in June of 2019 with a new production staged by David McVicar. The conductor was Eun Sun Kim, now SFO Music Director Designate. By way of fair disclaimer, I should note that I saw only the second of these two productions.
The libretto was written by Jaroslav Kvapil, probably inspired by both Hans Christian Anderson’s tale “The Little Mermaid” and the novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, both of which involve love between a mortal man and a supernatural female of the water. On the musical side Dvořák cultivated great interest in Richard Wagner’s capacity for harnessing music to intense and complex drama. As I wrote about the opening of the 2019 production, Dvořák’s debt to Wagner is immediately apparent in the opening scene, in which “it is difficult to listen to the rich trio work of the three wood nymphs and not think of the nymphs of the Rhine from Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.”
The one thing this production had in common with the 2017 Met production was the performance of mezzo Jamie Barton as the witch Ježibaba. The other leading Met performers were bass Eric Owens as Vodnik, the water goblin that is Rusalka’s father, and tenor Brandon Jovanovich as the Prince that so prompts Rusalka’s passion that she seeks out Ježibaba to be transformed into a mortal human. The Met conductor was Mark Elder, whose only SFO performance took place in November and December of 2015 for the performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Suffice it to say that, on that occasion, he had considerable trouble keeping the brass in balance with the rest of the orchestra; but this difficulty was not evident during this Met recording.
Indeed, there was basically nothing deserving complaint where the music was concerned, whether in the pit or on the stage. The Met director, on the other hand, was Mary Zimmerman; and she was definitely the weakest link in the chain. As a stage director, Zimmerman made her reputation by taking on major literary projects, going all the way back to the Greek myths but also including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. She made her Met debut in 2007 with her staging of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Rusalka was my “first contact” with one of her operatic undertakings.
The libretto for Rusalka is closer to Greek myths than to any of the Donizetti operas. Indeed, it follows the Greek model of a narrative based on an interaction between the natural world and the supernatural. Those interactions seldom turn out for the better, and Rusalka’s fate is on an uninterrupted downhill slope from her first appearance in the first act to the final moments of the third act. Unfortunately, Zimmerman never seems to miss an opportunity to “sweeten up” the staging with eye candy. Perhaps she thought that such a dark narrative would require a “spoonful of sugar” to make “the medicine go down;” but most of that sugar tended to detract from the contexts of the personalities (both human and supernatural) involved in the unfolding of the plot. Ironically, the libretto itself has moments of comic relief that work as well as any of William Shakespeare’s similar devices did; but Zimmerman never seemed to give these moments a fair shake as part of the overall narrative.
Thus, while the SFO Rusalka left an impression deep enough to be identified as the June entry in my “Memorable Concerts of 2019” article, I came away from this morning’s viewing experience feeling more than a little disconcerted.
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