Rusalka

Friday evening Melanie and I attended the Boston Lyric Opera's production of Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka. Melanie is the chief opera lover in the family, but I'm slowly learning to enjoy it, too. We've generally been quite impressed with the quality of the BLO. We're not connoisseurs yet, but we do have some prior experience against which to compare our local company. (Melanie has been to opera after opera as a student in Germany, but I've only seen opera in Santa Fe — which has a fantastic amphitheater that presents a majestic view over a canyon at sunset — and Milan.) In Boston, we've seen L'elisir d'amore and Les contes d'Hoffmann, both of which were spectacular. If you have any interest in opera, or are willing to risk developing an interest, we can unreservedly recommend the BLO.

That being said, our Rusalka experience was not quite the bees knees. We ate at the Rock Bottom Brewery beforehand, which was filling but unexceptional. It's a fun place to go with friends for some beer and potato-based grub, but you pay for the proximity to the theater. Melanie had a Lumpy Dog Lager, and I tried the Munich Gold. Both were so light as to be weightless, an illusion belied by the carb count and the incrementally increasing bulge of my belly. Though ephemeral, the beers were not exactly watery, but in toto they amounted to little. There is better beer to be had for less elsewhere, and the same goes without saying of the burgers. But as a pre-theatrical repast it served its purpose.

We had bought opera tickets (for this performance, balcony level) at half-price several months ago; there is a special day in September or October when the BLO sells tickets at a discount to the under-40 set. As we climbed the stairs, we were swarmed by a busload of high school students on a field trip to Boston; their chaperones had the brilliant idea that a bunch of hormone-imbalanced adolescents in the throes of Wii-withdrawal would enjoy a refined night out at the opera. How foolish.

They filled in the rows behind us in the balcony, chatting, messaging, groaning, squealing, sighing, and swinging their legs over the seat backs, filling the space normally reserved for polite silence with their juvenile frivolity.

But to the opera itself: The musical score was superb; I'm convinced that Dvorak ranks among my favorite composers (my classical music collection is so paltry, this is not necessarily an encomium of much significance). I'm partial to the Slavonic Dances, and I like the Symphony No. 9; Rusalka's music is stylistically reminiscent, but at some points more dramatic, to the point of being slightly melodramatic, but I don't mind. I'd buy the CD, even though as a rule I don't like hearing opera music without the accompanying visual spectacle unfolding on stage before me. The performance of the music I can't judge so well; my impression is that the BLO musicians are not on par with the BSO, but I would be unsurprised to find some BSO musicians moonlighting for the opera.

The singing was also very good. I'm unfamiliar with the singers, except one who had sung in Les contes d'Hoffmann. A fair number were locally grown and raised; Boston seems to possess quite a lot of musical talent.

The story was a bit boring: woodland sprite falls in love with human prince; sprite becomes human to join with the prince, but is cursed to be mute; prince turns away from sprite; sprite returns to forest, cursed for having once been human; prince's attempt to regain sprite proves fatal. Parts reminded me of The Little Mermaid. The pot-bellied, bulbous-nosed, Rapunzel-coifed witch came straight from Central European fairy tale central casting, and was quite amusing. But she was the only character to catch the eye. The others were rather plain, and the set design was subdued and uninspiring. (The prince's castle hewed to the proudly unimaginative precepts of the Concrete Monumentalist school of architecture, whose prime exemplars are found in the former East Bloc and Boston's Government Center.)

The opera is sung in Czech, which would be interesting to learn but which is hardly as aurally pleasing as French or Italian. The music had to make up for the libretto's apparent lack of poetry (hard to tell, it could just have been a coarse translation), the plainness of the set and the static stage directions (there were many scenes with little movement, just two characters singing to each other from opposite sides of the stage.) Dvorak was probably up to the task, but we lost interest by the third movement (we were also pretty tired, beyond being tired of the high schoolers), and we went home early. This was hardly a vote against the opera or the BLO, simply an indication that this particular production was not the most exciting we've seen. But no matter — we will definitely be back for more nights at the opera!