The archaic motif of Melusines, Undines, mermaids and water nymphs who present a contrast to the “real” world of humans exists in many different cultures: two worlds that make each other suffer but that are also attracted to the otherness of their counterpart.

Rusalka has fallen madly in love with a human. She is ready to pay a high price if it means that she can leave her familiar waters behind and enter the strange sphere of human beings. To exchange her fishtail for two legs she will have to agree to lose her voice. Thus her love for the human prince has become literally unspeakable – and therefore doomed to fail because a shared communication has become impossible. Rusalka herself is unable to understand this strange world with all its peculiar rules, and she cannot make herself understood either, which inevitably renders her an outsider. When she returns to her family, disappointed and unredeemed, love’s destructive forces, which crush entire worlds and plunge them into oblivion, have already been unleashed.

Antonín Dvořák’s opera is a lyrical tale about how the sensitive individual is dashed against an accelerated and efficient world whose rules and regulations it is unfamiliar with. Songlike moments, mainly allotted to the denizens of the water world, alternate with aria passages whose form frames the more conventional human characters. The colouring of Slavic-Bohemian folk music can be heard just like the characterisation of protagonists through leitmotifs. Director Tatjana Gürbaca works at Europe’s major opera houses and is celebrated for the psychological precision and narrative power of her productions. She was voted “Director of the Year” by the magazine Opernwelt and joins Staatsoper Hannover for the first time.