Rusalka: victim or predator

Corinne Winters makes her debut as Dvorak's water-nymph

Silver Moon: Corinne Winters sings her first Rusalka Picture © ORW-Liège/J.Berger

This review was first published in Jan Geisbusch’s German translation on Oper! Magazin’s website (oper-magazin.de) My original English version appears here by kind permission of the Editor, Dr UIrich Ruhnke.

One of the most heartening operatic developments of recent years has been the admission of Rusalka to the standard international repertoire. First performed at Prague’s National Theatre in 1901, Dvořák’s masterpiece was the first of his operas to succeed outside his homeland — invariably in representational productions which neglected or obscured the psychological subtext of Jaroslav Kvapil’s libretto.

The first time I saw it, as long ago as 1983, was in David Pountney’s long-enduring English National Opera production, in which he subjected the title character — a fairy-tale water nymph — to psychoanalysis. That production’s success aroused widespread international interest, though it still took a long time for some opera companies to realise Rusalka’s potential. In Belgium, for example, Stefan Herheim’s 2012 staging for La Monnaie/De Munt was the opera’s Brussels premiere. Nearly 12 years later, Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège follows suit with its first Rusalka, in a lavish, often penetrating staging by the London-based Greek director Rodula Gaitanou.