To What End <em>Rusalka</em>? Pushkin's Folk Tragedy and Dargomyzhskii's Opera

Abstract

Aleksandr Pushkin's unfinished folk tragedy, Rusalka (1826–32), was the first of the poet's six dramas to become an opera. The composer Aleksandr Dargomyzhskii (1813–69) stimulated in part by the popularity of Viennese magic-comic operetta on the mermaid theme, was the most successful of the later creative artists (playwrights, actors, theatre directors, poets, prose-writers, frauds) who ‘completed’ Pushkin's play. The means for doing this included adding lines, deleting lines, claiming to restore the poet's final ‘lost’ scenes (in the case of the fraud), populating Pushkin's final obscure plot outline with new characters and events and, finally, striving to realize the poet's intent through the resources of music — especially the vocal ensemble. This article surveys these attempts, and suggests that Dargomyzhskii's 1856 musical version of Rusalka, for all its adjustments, additions and concessions to mid-nineteenth-century operatic tradition, comes closest to reproducing the aesthetic and ethical charge of Pushkin's neoclassically conceived, Romantic-era dramatic text.