Dvorák, Antonín

Preface

Antonín Dvořák – Rusalka. Lyrical fairy-tale in three acts Op. 114

(b. Nelahozeves, 8 September 1841 – d. Prague, 1 May 1904)

(1900)
on a libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil

Preface
Rusalka, the last but one of Dvořák’s ten operas, stands alongside Smetana’s immortal Bartered Bride as the only Czech opera from the classical-romantic tradition to have taken hold in the international repertoire. In its native country it has been enormously popular ever since its première in 1901 and has never stood in need of rediscovery or special pleading. And in Rusalka’s first-act aria Mĕsíčku na nebi hlubokém (better known as Song to the Moon), Dvořák created a staple of the soprano repertoire that has come to rival Puccini’s Vissi d’arte and Un bel dí as an operatic warhorse.

The opera owes its origins to a young Czech littérateur named Jaroslav Kvapil (1868-1950), who in 1900, at the age of thirty-one, was still looking for an entrée into the world of the theater. Drawing on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s tale Undine, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, and the Slavic fairy tales of Karel Jaromir Erben and Božena Němcová, with an admixture from Gerhard Hauptmann’s recent, ponderously symbolic fairy-tale play Die versunkene Glocke (“The Sunken Bell,” 1897), Kvapil independently produced a libretto on the time-honored subject of the water nymph who falls in love with a human and sacrifices her immortality for what she hopes will be a life of amorous bliss. He then approached several leading Czech composers of his day – Foerster, Kovařovic, Josef Suk – hoping to interest them in his new creation. For various reasons they all turned him down. Missing from the list was the most celebrated Czech composer of them all, Antonín Dvořák, before whom the young man felt decidedly intimidated. Through the intercession of a friend, however, Dvořák was shown the libretto and, to Kvapil’s surprise, immediately decided to set it to music. Kvapil went on to a respectable career in the theater, first as remarkably progressive literary adviser and stage director at the Prague National Opera, and later as head of Prague’s Vinohrady Theater.

The subject-matter of Rusalka could hardly but appeal to a composer who had just completed a series of tone-poems on Slavic legends and fairy-tales (Vodník – The Water Goblin, 1895; Polednice – The Noon Witch, 1896; Zlatý kolovrat – The Golden Spinning Wheel, 1896; Holoubek – The Wild Dove, 1896) and who relished the prospect of filling out the depictions of his beloved Bohemian countryside with rich orchestral music. The setting proceeded at an unusually fast pace: Act I was sketched in a remarkably short period between 21 April and 8 May 1900 and orchestrated by 27 June; Act II was completed on 4 September, and Act III on 27 November. Dvořák was able avail himself of ideas from the “American sketchbook” that he had laid out during his years in New York (1892-95). …

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