That fount of received wisdom Heather Mac Donald (not pictured) is at it again, calling out Our Own JJ for his desire to see a more varied and thoughtful dramatic reading of Rusalka at the Met. (As if a version more monotonous or inattentive were imaginable!)
To Ms. Mac Donald, ça va sans dire, JJ’s longing for a little change of pace is in fact “part of a larger attack on the humanistic tradition [which] is also behind the gutting of humanistic study in the academy and its replacement by facile identity politics.” As Thelma Ritter once said with such decided eloquence, “Oh, brother!
Well, JJ did respond to H-Mac, though the answer got a little garbled in the uploading. As a semi-public service, La Cieca inserts a corrected version of his rebuttal.
Ms. Mac Donald seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that “Rusalka” is a real person, ascribing to her the characteristics “vulnerable” and “child-like.” In fact, at the very most “Rusalka” is a constuct, a character devised in order that a story might be told about her.
So far is “Rusalka” from being real that even that noun usually thought of as her proper name is no such thing: “Rusalka” means simply “water nymph.” She is therefore not a person or even a thing, but an idea, or, more to the point, a symbol. Without an understood meaning, such a symbol is pointless.
What water nymphs of any sort (mermaids, sirens, Rhinemaidens) all express is a male idea or anyway an intuition of how a woman “attracts” a man’s sexual desire. In other words, the notion of the nymph is a primitive attempt at explaining the phenomenon of involuntary sesual attraction. A man looks at a woman and he suddenly feels a powerful compulsion, a longing so strong that he may even commit a violent crime to assuage that yearning. Where does this bizarre sensation come from? Not from inside, surely; it must be imposed somehow from without: there is a sort of sex witch out there that puts a spell on men and makes them have these wild urges.
So that is what a rusalka is: a personification of male sexual desire, externalized. Her function is to attract, to seduce. Perhaps this desire-being is conscious of this power she wields, and moreover she is malicious: then we call her a “femme fatale” and we name her Circe or Alcina. Or maybe she radiates this attractiveness quite innocently, the way a lump of gold glistening in the sunlight attracts men’s greed, and we call her Woglinde.
Ironically (or maybe it’s just that Ms. Mac Donald’s thinking is so woodenly conventional she misses the point) the whole action of the opera Rusalka is that one of these water nymphs/foci of male desire can never be human, and to attempt to treat one as if she were human can lead only to the most disastrous consequences. What’s particularly dangerous here is that this symbol looks and acts so much like a real person it is very difficult to tell them apart; in fact, as Jung might say, in some cases this anima archetype is projected directly over the person of a real human woman, and the man approaching her cannot tell what is flesh and what is projected desire.
It is precisely this idea that Herheim explores in his reworking of the Rusalka story: the sweet little hooker on the corner (a sort of Cabiria/Irma La Douce figure) is not recognized as an actual person by the Vodnik, but rather as the confused mass of feelings and attitudes about women he projects onto her.
The Kusej production takes a very different tack, and so in my opinion can be regarded as complementary to the Herheim. Here Rusalka is very identifiable as a person, an abused child raped by her father. (He of course does not regard his act as rape; rather, he believes that his daughter is seducing him.) Because of this horrific abuse, Rusalka has no sense of being an actual person, and so when she is “transformed into a real woman,” (i.e., rescued from her basement prison and shoved out into the real world) she becomes the target of yet more abuse from the Prince.
The endings of the two productions strongly contrast, but they both carry the cautionary message of the original tale, which is that sexuality is an extremely powerful force and must be handled with care and mature understanding. In neither version (any more than in the Met’s) does Rusalka die: she simply returns to her abstracted state of potentiality: Herheim’s hooker casually flirts with an onlooker to the Vodnik’s arrest; Kusej’s mental patient wanders blankly away from the bleeding Prince.
What these productions do, and in doing so I think more closely fulfill the meaning underlying Dvorak’s yearning but cool music than does the Met’s production, is to remind the viewer that all the seductiveness (including the innocence and vulnerability) “projected” by the rusalka is in fact an illusion, or rather a reflection of one’s own desire to be seduced. Rusalks is like the moon she serenades, a passive object that only seems to take on life when light is reflected from her.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
