Rusalka

The mermaid Rusalka loves the prince - a human! She wants to risk everything, the loss of her family and her home, to become a human woman. Transformed by the witch Ježibaba, she must face the prince in silence, telling him of her love only through her looks and gestures. If the prince does not fall in love with her, he must die and she must live as an outcast from then on. Rusalka's appearance initially beguiles the prince, but the magical, voiceless creature remains a foreign body in the human world, and eventually her lover turns his back on her...

With great scenic dedication, Antonín Dvořák set the contrasting worlds of the ghostly, flowing underwater realm and the distant, stiff royal court to music in his "Lyrical Fairy Tale" in 1901. After "Der fliegende Holländer" (The Flying Dutchman), Russian director Vasily Barkhatov returns to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein with "Rusalka".