It marked the return of director Emma Dante to the stage of La Scala, as well as the first performance in the Milanese theater of Antonín Dvořák’s masterpiece, “Rusalka”, which Rai Cultura will premiere on TV on Thursday 19 October at 9.15pm on Rai 5. The new staging of the opera, which was staged last June, is directed by Tomáš Hanus. The sets are by Carmine Maringola and the costumes by Vanessa Sannino.
“Rusalka” is one of the masterpieces of European musical theatre: after a few decades of oblivion, since the 1980s the happiness of the melodies, the popular echoes, the fairy-tale atmosphere and the complexity of the references have made it a very popular title again and frequently performed in Europe, the United States, the East.
For its first production of the opera, La Scala chose Olga Bezsmertna in the title role and Dmitry Korchak as the Prince, while Elena Guseva is the Water Princess, Okka von der Damerau is Ježibaba the witch and Jongmin Park is Vodník , the spirit of the waters; they are joined by Jiří Rajniš, Svetlina Stoyanova, Hila Fahima, Juliana Grigoryan, Valentina Pluzhnikova and Ilya Silchukou.
In Slavic folklore, rusalka are water nymphs capable of attracting unfortunates who dare to approach into the whirlpools. The legend – in which a creature of the waters turns to a witch to transform herself into a girl at the cost of the gift of speech and aspires to the love of a prince who will betray her and who, depending on the versions, she will kill or refuse to kill, sacrificing in exchange his own life – is widespread in numerous tales and fairy tales of the Nordic, Slavic and Germanic tradition. In 1811 it was codified in the story Undine by Friederich de La Motte Fouqué, the subject of countless adaptations in the years to come.
The director of the National Theater in Prague František Šubert proposed to Dvořák the text by the young man of letters Jaroslav Kvapil which enriched the Nordic legend of the water nymph with elements of Bohemian folklore. Dvořák created a score that assimilates the Wagnerian language while remaining in the territories of the fairy tale rather than in those of the myth, and prefers the most typical forms of musical Romanticism, starting from the ballad, reworking with lightness and melodic fluidity ideas of Bohemian popular music according to the principles of musical nationalism that he had already supported during his stay in the United States. It is no coincidence that some critics have spoken of “Czech impressionism”. The result is an enchanted soundscape, animated by a panic feeling of nature and stylized in elegant liberty scrolls.
2023-10-19 19:16:16
#Scalas #Rusalka
