LGM Classical – Water Sprites At The Santa Fe Opera
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The Santa Fe Opera House is a lovely venue. It is open to the now warm evening air, and the audience at the sides may feel wind and rain. A few years back, wind baffles were installed to moderate the wind. Once upon a time, it was necessary to bring blankets or jackets. Global warming says no more.
Friday night’s performance was accompanied by the crescent moon setting behind clouds.
The Opera House has always had a water feature not dependent on the weather: a running moat around the orchestra. Two of this year’s productions had on-stage water features.
Antonín Dvořák’s “Rusalka” and Claude Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” were two of the Opera’s productions this year. I saw both, “Rusalka” in dress rehearsal, and “Pelléas et Mélisande” in regular performance. Both derive from the myth of a water spirit who falls in love with a human, becomes human, regrets it, and dies.
It’s fashionable to modernize opera productions now, and both of these were modernized. Sir David Pountney, the director of “Rusalka,” decided for some odd reason that it was a Freudian drama set in a 19th-century mental hospital. Although a part of the stage set and costumes suggested this, fortunately his vision did not come through. A few days after we saw the performance, my piano teacher learned of this interpretation and asked me if that was my perception. We both were baffled.
The myth is often taken as symbolizing women’s experience. They come out of a semiconscious existence (the water) into a real life with men, which may turn out to be unsatisfactory. I suspect the first step is what persuaded the director of Freudianness. But Freud’s weaknesses are now recognized, and the idea the women are somehow “awakened” by interaction with men has also been superseded.
There’s another reading of the myth, of which the hospital setting reminded me. Both operas have elderly male characters who champion the women. In “Rusalka,” this character had a leg injury, which suggests the Fisher King, the injured king of a blighted land.
“Rusalka” premiered in 1901, “Pelléas et Mélisande” in 1902. An anxiety in Europe about industrialization and the damage it could do to the environment would not be surprising at that time. Nor would be the use of the Fisher King myth, which is suggested in both operas rather than explicit. Richard Wagner had explicitly used it to different ends in “Parsifal,” which premiered twenty years earlier.
The set design in “Pelléas et Mélisande” included background screens on which forests, water, a lighthouse, and symbols of industrialization were projected – chemical formulas, blueprints, and, while Golaud explains to Mélisande how things are to be in his very controlling castle, piping and valves.
The plots diverge: Rusalka is put in a vitrine, as are wild animals the Prince has killed, while the Prince indulges himself with other women. The Witch tells Rusalka she must kill the Prince or she will die. She cannot kill the Prince and dies. Golaud becomes insanely jealous of Mélisande’s interactions with his brother Pelléas and kills both of them.
It’s intriguing to wonder how deliberate the choice of two operas with such similar themes was.
Both composers are unusual in the opera repetoire. Both lean, rather, toward the orchestral. Dvořák’s music works better for singing because it draws from folk songs. Debussy provides extensive orchestral interludes.
In the Santa Fe productions, Ailyn Pérez sings the role of Rusalka beautifully. The men are more prominent in “Pelléas et Mélisande”. There, the role of King Arkel, Golaud’s grandfather, was particularly well sung by Raymond Aceto. He dominated the fourth and fifth acts.