Composed: 1900 Premiered: 1901, Prague Libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil after Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine Act I Rusalka, a water nymph, has fallen in love with a prince. She longs to leave the water and acquire human form. Vodník, a water spirit, tells her that Ježibaba the witch can grant her every human power except ...
embarked on writing songs that were keyed in to Russian speech patterns. Here he found his own niche, with lyrical as well as dramatic and declamatory melodies. His opera Rusalka, produced in St Petersburg in 1856, was in a similar genre, with its colourful folk setting. Sadly Dargomïzhsky died before completing his last opera, The Stone ...
a civil service career. Emulating the example of his contemporary Glinka, Dargomïzhsky followed his first opera Esmeralda (1839) with two works of overtly Russian character based on Pushkin, Rusalka (1856) and The Stone Guest (completed in 1870 by Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov). The exploration of speech inflection and realism in this last work had a profound influence on ‘The Five’, ...
The last part of his career shows a continued capacity for surprise in the astonishing neo-primitivism of his late symphonic poems (1896–97) and the ravishingly lyrical and finely characterized opera Rusalka (1900). Rusalka Although Dvořák is viewed today mainly as a composer of orchestral and chamber music, he wrote 11 operas and, particularly towards the end of his life ...
subjects was not for Dvořák, and for his most successful theatre work he took on a folk story by Jaroslav Kvapil. Unlike many operas written at the time, Rusalka is not a high-octane drama but rather a bewitching, lyrical love story told at a distance. Introduction | Turn of the Century | Opera Major Operas | Rusalka by ...
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