Scottish Opera's Rusalka

Anne Sophie Duprels as Rusalka and Peter Wedd as the prince in Rusalka. Scottish Opera 2016. Credit James Glossop.

There are small matters of production that, as a good critic, I cannot ignore. But just now, I want to capture the moment. Three hours of opera doesn't always seem like an easy choice, and perhaps I had left after Act I, I might have been able to escape the fate that befell me two acts later...

I don't want to believe in romanticism... I mean the music, I mean the ethos that seems so naive and trusting in the power of art and nature and God and humans and... it's just a bourgeois medium, keep reminding yourself, it's just the marriage of Aristotle's ideas of emotional purgation mixed in with good old Diderot's belief that theatre must speak to the dominant class...

Keep reminding yourself... 

But mind blown, barely able to speak... the moment at the end (and yes, she's breaking the fourth wall, and yes, she is talking to me)...

for your fickle passions, may GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL 

I don't want anyone to see me weeping. Keep reminding yourself... but the brokenness, the cynical modern unrequited lover, the critic who sits in the corner of the feast and moans about the excessive serving or the poor arrangement of the garnish on the edge of the plate... 

If I allow it, it will make me believe again, make me believe that the universe permits redemption, that my sinful soul can be released and so and so and so.

Like an atheist who sees a Christian becoming born again, I want to close my eyes, to deny it, to shout out that this is just emotional manipulation. It's the lightning flash of revelation, when the art-object strikes the consciousness of the observer and sparks the fire of art, of meaning, and somewhere, just in this connection, there is purpose and hope. 

Three hours and it builds. More than just when the undead turn and tell me that it is me who has condemned them and yet they are willing to forgive me. All of my sins are laid out in sequence, and the sins that I am ready to perform in the future. And all these sins are jewels of a necklace, threaded around my alienation, which is the original sin.

And for a moment, connection. Her voice pierces me. Everything that I have done is swept away. In the flood of emotion, I reach out to my post-modern theories and find that they crumble beneath my hands. 

Only connect. Only connect.