At its premiere in 1901 at the National Theater in Prague, Rusalka became the greatest success Dvorák had ever experienced with his stage works. Subsequently, this opera became the second most popular work in his home country after Smetana's The Bartered Bride. With its subject, which combines Fouquet's fairy tale Undine with elements from H. C. Andersen's The Little Mermaid and Gerhart Hauptmann's fairy-tale drama The Sunken Bell, Dvorák follows a series of earlier compositions that also testify to his preference for fairy-tale material. In Rusalka, Dvorák responds most sensitively to Jaroslav Kvapil's multi-layered text, masterfully evoking the fairy-tale world of mermaids, water spirits, and elves with advanced harmony and impressionistic handling of orchestral timbres. The dense lyrical expressivity and the poignant melancholy of his tonal language do the rest to fully justify the popularity of this opera.
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