“Even divine nature needs its diminuendos and morendos, in order to come to life again and rise up, heading for a great crescendo, attaining her strength and stature once more in a mighty ff [fortissimo].” So wrote the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, in an October 12, 1892 letter to the Kroměříž-based jurist and music connoisseur Emil Kozánek. And much the same goes for works of artistic creation, some of which capture the collective imagination the moment they appear, while others languish in obscurity until a more favorable moment arrives, when they can be resurrected and finally afforded a stature in keeping with their true value.
Only in recent years has Rusalka been recognized for what it is — one of Dvořák’s greatest achievements, shimmering and haunting and at times genuinely sinister.
Placing a crescendo after a diminuendo is an effective way of creating dynamic contrast, resulting in emotional depth and dramatic tension; discovering or resuscitating a lost work of art after years of oblivion similarly results in a sort of dynamic contrast between the past and the present.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of hearing for the first time Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Serenade in C, K. 648 (“Ganz kleinen Nachtmusik”), a delicate and altogether diverting early string trio uncovered just last year in the musical archives of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries. These sorts of out-of-the-blue rediscoveries, like the Mozart serenade, or the Waltz in A Minor by Frédéric Chopin that turned up around the same time in the Morgan Library and Museum, are undeniably exciting. But there is something equally gratifying about a composition that was never lost, strictly speaking, but instead unjustly maligned or woefully under-appreciated, its merits only gradually being recognized over the course of years or decades or centuries, until eventually working its way into the standard repertoire. A slower crescendo, perhaps, but an equally mighty fortissimo in the end.
Take Antonin Dvořák’s Rusalka, an opera (or lyric fairy tale) with an origin every bit as magical as its subject matter. Each summer, Dvořák would retire to his summer home in the village of Vysoká u Příbramě, 50 kilometers or so southwest of Prague, where he composed his folk music-inflected symphonies, concertos, and operas, cared for his beloved pigeons, and cultivated his lush garden, which he “nurtured with great care and loved as God’s divine work,” as he put it in a letter to his publisher Fritz Simrock.
Near his property was a small forest-circled tůnka, a lake, pool, or mere, where Dvořák often sought inspiration, and where he claimed to have encountered a fairy, or perhaps a rusalka, mavka, navka, vila, poludnitsa, or some other Slavic tutelary spirit, floating above the placid waters. This experience resulted in Rusalka, based on a libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil, which tells the tragic tale of a water spirit who falls in love with a human prince, much to the dismay of the goblin Vodník and the foreign princess to whom the prince is betrothed. And to this day, the little tůnka in Vysoká u Příbramě is known as Rusalcino jezirko, “Rusalka’s Pond,” while Dvořák’s summer home has been renamed “Villa Rusalka.”
Rusalka opened to considerable critical and popular acclaim in Prague on March 31, 1901, and was soon beloved in the Czech lands, but it struggled to find its footing abroad, despite featuring a familiar plot (related to Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid), a wealth of evocative pictorial musical depictions, a genuinely iconic soprano aria in the form of “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém,” or “Song to the Moon,” and, in its final section, what the opera critic Max Loppert has called some of “the most glorious minutes in all opera” with their “majestic, almost hymnic solemnity.” Otakar Sourek, a Czech musicologist, called Rusalka “one great song,” given its through-composed passages and Wagnerian leitmotifs; it would take decades for that great song to waft beyond the Czech lands.
In the immediate aftermath of Rusalka’s premiere, Gustav Mahler wrote eagerly to Dvořák, begging a copy of the score so that he might have it translated and mounted at the Vienna Hofoper. Mahler did manage to render the lyrics into German, and assembled an outstanding cast, but privately wondered whether Rusalka would be a success, and put off the premiere for season after season, in favor of more established works by Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
Various excuses were made for not staging the Czech composer’s masterpiece in 1903, for instance that King George of Saxony happened to be in Vienna, and apparently an opera dealing with unrequited love could not possibly be mounted given the Saxon monarch’s daughter-in-law’s having run off with her French tutor, or some such nonsense, and by the following year Dvořák had passed away, likely of a pulmonary embolism, at the age of sixty-two.
Dvořák’s widow, Anna Dvořáková, clung to the hope that Mahler might follow through with his plans, only to be told that the opera was unlikely to see the light of Viennese day, and in any event would only provoke German chauvinists, who had been protesting the Hofoper’s recent performance of Oskar Nedbal’s ballet Pohádka o Honzovi (The Tale of Honza) solely on the grounds that the composer, a gifted student of Dvořák’s, was Czech.
It took seven years for Rusalka to be performed outside the Czech lands, first in Ljubljana. The Brno Opera did perform Dvořák’s lyric fairy tale at Vienna’s Workers’ House in 1910, but the Viennese State Opera did not get around to mounting it until 1987. Amateur companies staged the opera at Chicago’s Sokol Slav Hall in 1935, and at London’s Peter Jones Theater in 1950, but it remained criminally neglected, even as it was being performed in Prague some six hundred times in its first 50 years.
As The Times lamented after the London debut, “It is left to amateurs to stage for us those operas by composers howsoever eminent which do not get into the international repertory.” Only in recent years has Rusalka been recognized for what it is — one of Dvořák’s greatest achievements, shimmering and haunting and at times genuinely sinister — thanks in no small part to the advocacy of the star soprano Renée Fleming, who played the titular spirit in an acclaimed 2014 production at the Metropolitan Opera. (She had previously claimed victory in the Met’s National Council Auditions back in 1988 with her rendition of the “Song to the Moon,” so her attachment to the opera is evidently genuine.)
The 21st century has been kinder to Rusalka than the 20th, with the opera appearing at the Royal Opera House (2012, 2023), the Berlin Komische Oper (2016), the Opéra national de Paris (2019), and elsewhere. It appears that Rusalka has even made something of a pop culture breakthrough, appearing as it does as a major plot point in Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, which provided the source material for the 2024 science fiction drama film Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, with the former (playing the cosmonaut Jakub) listening Dvořák’s opera during his eight-month space mission, and the latter (in the rôle of Jakub’s wife Lenka) appearing before her estranged husband as a rusalka at the film’s climax.
It seems an ideal historical moment, then, for the National Theatre Brno’s new production of Rusalka, directed by David Radok, which premiered on September 6, 2025, and has been made available on the invaluable free streaming platform OperaVision through March 6, 2026.
David Radok’s production, featuring a tasteful set design by Lars-Åke Thessman’s, is arguably the ideal incarnation of this fateful drama, avoiding as it does some of the pitfalls of earlier productions, like the Royal Opera House’s use of junk and plastic debris to convey some kind of message about ocean plastic, or the otherwise stellar Komische Oper Berlin production’s insistence on giving Rusalka a rather grotesque mermaid’s tail.
The Slovak soprano Linda Ballová is well-suited to the tragic rôle of Rusalka, with the crystalline quality of her upper register, and her ability to convey nuance with subtle shifts of tonal shading. Peter Berger acquits himself well as Rusalka’s beloved but doomed prince, Jan Šťáva gives us a suitably menacing Vodník, and particularly impressive is the chorus, which handles the Act II Polonaise with aplomb. Compared to other productions of the opera, which can be Disneyfied (the Pacific Opera Project has mounted a particularly garish version), or overly minimalistic, the National Theatre Brno is cohesive and well-suited to Dvořák’s vision.
Rusalka has at long last come into its own. Its themes of displacement and the search for the authentic self, of purity and corruption, and of the conflict between nature and civilization, are all timeless, yet increasingly relevant in our own era. We can only envy Dvořák’s connection to nature, and his ability to wander through the Vysoká woods and catch a glimpse of a water sprite; at least we moderns still have works like Rusalka to charm and challenge us.
Sadly, posterity has not always proven kind to Dvořák. The communist musicologist-turned-apparatchik Zdeněk Nejedlý waged a fanatical war against Dvořák’s musical legacy, banning many of his works alongside those of Leoš Janáček, Josef Suk, and other composers who sought inspiration from Slavic folk music, folklore, and history. His music survived, however. His Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” was taken into space on the Apollo 11 mission, his Slavonic Dances, cello concertos, and string quartets are performed the world over, and his opera Rusalka has at long last entered the standard repertoire.
Yet there are other Dvořák operas with timely themes out there just waiting to be rediscovered — the grand opera Dimitrij, a tale of Russian political disfunction, or the operatic pastoral comedy Jakobín, which pokes fun at the disillusionment that followed the French Revolution, or Vanda, a story of sacrifice in the face of foreign invasion based on a stirring episode of Polish history. Unlike Rusalka, these operas are still experiencing their “diminuendos and morendos.” Hopefully one day they will once again attain their “strength and stature once more in a mighty ff.”
At the end of the first act of Rusalka, the prince declaims to his beloved water maiden:
Vím, že jsi kouzlo, které mine,
a rozplyne se v mlžný rej,
leč dokud čas náš neuplyne,
ó, pohádko má, neprchej![I know you are but magic that will pass
And dissolve into a misty haze —
But until our time is up
O, my fairy-tale, do not disappear!]
Dvořák’s lyric fairy tale once seemed as if it might disappear in a misty haze, under-appreciated and even persecuted by German chauvinists, Czech communists, and unimaginative foreign audiences. The age-old magic that Dvořák encountered on his summer estate, and promptly set to music, still has not passed away, not quite at any rate, and that is something we must never take for granted.
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