A teachers` guide on Rusalka

Rusalka teachers’ guide
The Site
Go to http://www.operaland.org
then follow the link to Rusalka.
This site is intended to give you the
material you need to introduce your
students to Rusalka. The toolbars
take you to obvious categories like
the Characters or the Story, but you’ll
discover there’s also supplementary
information on things like forests, fairies,
and aliens – all the contextual topics that
feed into the plot.
The students can use the toolbars to discover these things for themselves, or they can click on
the little icons on the screen, that flash into life as mouse moves over them.
Getting to know Rusalka
The animated screens give a truncated version of the story. The whole plot can be found under
‘Story’ on the toolbar. If you have the time, the most effective way of getting the show across is
to tell the children the story yourself, using the audio clips as you go along.
You’ll discover that the audio clips are described in the text and very precisely numbered so that
if, for example, the text says ‘A harp joins in at (34)’ you’ll find that (34) corresponds to the time
count on the play bar.
Listening to the Music
Given the appealing nature of the Rusalka score, the children probably won’t mind listening to
the extracts a couple of times. On the second run through you might ask them to give a vigorous
cue when they hear the particular detail you’ve highlighted for them, the ‘danger’ theme
perhaps, or the alarming dance the wood nymphs stamp out on stage.
Rusalka teachers’ guide 1/10
History
Given the complete disappearance of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, it might be
useful to show the children a map of this
empire – and another of Bohemia itself.
The Austrian Empire is shown in yellow
(see this map in the appendix).
Bohemia is now part of the Czech
republic. You can see from the modern
map on the right how landlocked it is.
(Shakespeare never had a clue where it
was and famously gave it a sea shore in
The Winter’s Tale.)
This postcard (below), sent by Dvořák
from Chicago, has been addressed by
the composer to his friend Emil, who
lives – if you can read through the blot –
in Moravia. That too is now in the Czech
Republic but in those days it was part of the Austrian Empire, and Dvořák adds ‘Austria’ to the
address. That obviously wasn’t clear enough for the American post office, and some other hand
has scrawled ‘Europe’ on the left.
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Dvořák
There are very few pictures of Dvořák. This
is one of the most appealing.
He always looks happier when he’s with
his family: here he is, beaming, on the
right hand side of the picture, with his wife
and some of his children.
Nationalism
The 19th century is the age of nationalism. Country after country found its identity. Italy
threw out the Austrians and became one nation, instead of a mass of small kingdoms and
principalities. Germany – which didn’t really exist before the 19th century – acquired a frontier.
Suddenly everybody was interested in their native language and wanted great literature
produced in it, immediately. Italians and Germans practically invented modern Italian and
German – and people who spoke ‘peasant’ languages, like the Czechs, wanted poems and
operas written in their native tongue.
Dvořák went along with this completely: he was the genuine thing, the 19th century composer
who was deeply and unaffectedly patriotic. Of course he was aware of the tensions in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the nationalist movement in Bohemia, but he reacted to it in a
personal non-political way.
Rusalka teachers’ guide 3/10
He liked being Bohemian, he learnt German – but he didn’t buy into the Austro-Hungarian
marketing system. He didn’t want his first name changed from the Czech ‘Antonín’ into the
Austrian ‘Anton’, and he didn’t want the German version of his music titles (like the Slavonic
Dances) being printed before their proper Czech title. So when his publisher pushed for a more
German/Austrian look to his scores he received the following mild reply:
“Your last letter, in which you launched into national-political explanations amused me greatly...
but what have we to do with politics? Let us be grateful that we can dedicate our services solely
to art....though an artist too must have a fatherland, in which he can have a firm faith, and which
he must love.”
Dvořák couldn’t have said that, with such simplicity, in any century outside the 19th . It was not
immediately apparent to earlier composers (like Handel or Rossini or even Mozart) that an artist
needed to love his fatherland, but Dvořák really did.
Nice Guy
Dvořák never turned his back on his upbringing. For all the honours heaped on him by the
Austrian Empire, he was perfectly happy to be a Bohemian peasant. He remained a devout
Catholic, and never outgrew the pleasures of his youth – walking in the woods, keeping pigeons,
spotting trains. His librettist Jaroslav Kvapil sent him some birthday greetings and revealed that,
though Dvořák became the grand old man of Czech music, he didn’t frighten people. Kvapil says,
‘We mortals often feel ill at ease when close to great persons, but your proximity warms one with
the sincerity of a good, friendly human being, and thus I could always feel the closeness of your
genius as a pure, unmarred blessing.’
Forests
Rusalka is a tale from Northern Europe. It is based on a Danish story, Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Little Mermaid, and a Prussian tale, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine. But its specific
character is Czech. Rusalki are water sprites in Bohemia, they inhabit the rivers and pools of the
Bohemian forests, making the woods even more dangerous than they are anyway.
Most Northern tales start in a forest – if they don’t end in one. The children will probably be able
to come up with Hansel and Gretel and the sinister gingerbread house. You could ask them to
consider why forests are so frightening.
Rusalka teachers’ guide 4/10
Some possible answers are,
you can’t see far in them...
...you lose your sense of
direction, it’s easy to get
lost. It’s odd how quiet a
forest can go (and how
creepy once night falls). You
could meet anyone under
those trees – a woodcutter,
a witch, or a strange fairy
creature...
(This picture is from a Russian fairy tale).
Rusalka teachers’ guide 5/10
Land and water
The Rusalka story starts by a pool, moves on to dry land, then returns to water again. (Even on
dry land there’s a useful pond in the Prince’s park for Vodník the Water Goblin to lurk in.)
Some characters live wholly on land, others in the water,
some flit between the two. The prince swims in the Forest
pool and the wood nymphs in the opening sequence go as
near the pool as they dare – without being pulled in.
Rusalka ends up trapped between land and water –
neither water nymph nor woman.
The children could plot the story using a simple graph,
like the one to the right, showing how the action and the
characters move in and out of the water.
Fairies, Nixies and Näcks
Fairyland is full of creatures who are
dangerous to meet. Wilis in the German
forests dance men to death, and Nixies
(German water nymphs) and Mermaids
are always trying to lure men into water.
Sometimes the creatures mean to kill them
– the Rusalki tickle human beings to death –
but quite often they’re just thoughtless. They
forget that humans can’t live underwater, or
without proper food.
(right: Nixies from Arthur Rackham’s
illustrations to Wagner’s Ring)
The Day of Judgement
In many folk tales the fairies are envious of
human beings. We call fairies ‘immortals’ but
that’s not accurate. Fairies are actually ‘long
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livers’. They don’t die as we do, and it is supposed that they will live until the Day of Judgement.
The point is, what will happen to them then? Fairies don’t have souls – where will they go?
Many fairy stories, like Rusalka, are fuelled by this anxiety. It might be an idea to ask your class
to read The Little Mermaid, to understand Rusalka’s dilemma (they may also clock up the fact
that, when a fairy becomes a human, some bits of the new body don’t work too well...)
The following Swedish story, makes the point very clearly.
The Sensitive Näck
One day a farm boy was on his way home and saw a Näck (a Scandinavian water troll) sitting
on a rock in the middle of a stream and playing his fiddle. ‘On Judgement Day’ he sang, ‘on
Judgement Day, God’s mercy will be mine!’ The boy shouted, ‘No it won’t! You’re far too ugly!’
The Näck was heartbroken and began to shriek so loudly that he could be heard for miles
around. When the boy got home, his father looked at him. ‘Are you anything to do with this
ghastly noise?’ he said, and the boy told him he’d been putting a Näck right about Judgement
Day. ‘Oh did you?’ said Dad, and sent him straight back to the Näck with a message. The boy ran
down to the stream and called out to the Näck, ‘Oi! My Dad has read a lot more than me, and he
says you will obtain God’s mercy”. The Näck stopped shrieking, picked up his fiddle, and
cheered up.
Aliens
Nowadays we are more likely to find fairies at the other end of the galaxy, rather than the
bottom of the garden. The fact that we call them ‘aliens’ makes very little difference.
Aliens in space fantasy are non human creatures with awesome powers, just like traditional
goblins and nymphs in fairy tales. And we tell the same sorts of stories about them.
Aliens may look vaguely human, but they are not like us. They are logical, unfeeling, incapable
of lying, and either unbelievably good or very wicked indeed. They don’t understand half tones,
or pity, and they are exasperated by human weakness and stupidity. But they – and the human
heroes of these stories – usually acknowledge that humans have a richer experience of life.
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Sending the children home to watch a Star Trek episode
– or any current space fantasy – might be a useful exercise...
(Mr Spock is the impassive alien on the left)
Why do we tell ourselves stories like Rusalka, and Star Trek?
Perhaps inventing fairies and aliens helps us work out what it
is to be a real human being.
The Glyndebourne production
And, finally, looking at some Glyndebourne production shots might be helpful.
Talk your class through the problems of putting on Rusalka.
How do you do make a forest pool on the stage?
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Even more difficult, how does the singer playing
Rusalka cope with being silent for practically the
whole of Act 2?
The pictures tell you – by being an excellent actor.
Here is Rusalka in Act 2, beautifully dressed and
terrified by the human beings around her (right).
And here she is (below) trying to come between the
Prince and the Foreign Princess.
It’s only at the very end that she and
the Prince can finally look at each other
and talk... (right).
But by then it’s too late.
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Appendix: Map of Central Europe.
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