One more opera note and I’ll get off it. We completed our recent spasm with a viewing of Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka—the famous-all-over-town version from the Paris Bastille in 2002 (link). We pretty much buy into the conventional view on this one—it’s a fine showcase for Renée Fleming, well sung all around. But the staging is—oh, I guess it isn’t quite as outrageous as some of the critics have said, but it didn’t really work. People, this is a water-nymph we’re talking about here. Putting her in a swimming pool is okay, but the chambermaids at the Paris Radisson are going to have some drying issues.
But what interests me at the moment is to braket Rusalka with Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček, which we listened to just last week. Turns out that they were premiered within three years of each other – Rusalka on 31 March 1901, and Jenůfa on 21 January 1904—and next door —Rusalka in
There are a thousand obvious differences between the two, but I want to dwell for a moment on what, for lack of a better name, I would have to call the style. I’m not enough of a musician to get under the hood here, but I do think I can hear an underlying tone, timbre, rhythm, which the share with each other and which you just don’t find in the west. I am tempted to call it “Eastern,” but that may not be quite right: I don’t hear it in Russian music, although I do, perhaps, hear something similar in the Hungarian music of Béla Bartók (whose own only opera premiered down the road in
Rusalka is gratifying in its way, but I have to say that of the two, I prefer Jenůfa. They say that Dvořák’s fell under the influence of Wagner, and it shows, and for my money, that isn’t necessarily a compliment. You can tell even here that Dvořak’s real first love is not opera but concert work. Jenůfa, meanwhile, even though it may come out of a tradition, has a tang all its own.
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