Half-wild, half-woman, full staging

Sprites and other fairy-tale creatures appear in ''Rusalka,'' Dvorák's opera about a water nymph in love with a human prince. (Evan Richman/Globe Staff)

There's nothing fishy about the Boston Lyric Opera production of "Rusalka," by Czech composer Antonin Dvorák, opening tonight at the Citi Shubert Theatre.

Director Eric Simonson has staged this fairy-tale opera about a water nymph who falls in love with a human prince as a universal story of love. "Without any fins or fishy scales," he said in a recent phone interview. "I want the audience to be moved by the characters. It's about two people in love, trying to break through dimensions. They are struggling to be together even though they can't be."

A joint production with Minnesota Opera, this "Rusalka" is inspired, Simonson explained, by two films that tell similar stories about angels who cross over to the mortal world in search of love. One is "Wings of Desire" (1987) by German director Wim Wenders. The other is "Heaven Can Wait," originally directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1943 and remade by Warren Beatty in 1978.

"I didn't want to do anything outrageous," Simonson said. "It's a simple, sad story about being an outsider." By all accounts, this will be the first fully staged production of "Rusalka" ever presented in Boston.

Composed in 1900 and first staged in 1901 in Prague, Dvorák's "Rusalka" is the best-known of numerous operas and musical works featuring mermaids, water nymphs, water sprites, undines, and rusalki. Among other composers who have included half-human, half-amphibian creatures in their works are Richard Wagner (the Rhine Maidens in "Das Rheingold"), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (the opera "May Night") and Alexander von Zemlinsky (the symphonic fantasy "Die Seejungfrau").

When asked to explain the appeal of these mysterious water-dwelling maidens to creative artists and audiences, Simonson responded immediately, with a chuckle: "Because they are topless, of course!"

Actually the rusalka, a variety of water creature specific to Slavic cultures, is different from a mermaid and unlike them, not usually depicted as bare-breasted or finned. According to folklore, the rusalka is the soul of a young woman or girl whose death came unnaturally or violently, due to the actions of an unfaithful lover. Transformed into a half-human creature living in lakes and ponds and streams, the rusalka can be freed from her cruel fate only when her death is avenged. With long reed-like hair and irresistible shrill laughter, a rusalka lures unsuspecting men into the water and drowns them.

For the libretto of his opera, Dvorák used a text written by the Czech writer Jaroslav Kvapil. He in turn borrowed elements from the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Little Mermaid." The libretto incorporates many references to local Czech and Moravian folklore, reflecting the strong nationalistic streak in Czech culture around 1900.

The plot is simple. When the curtain rises at the edge of a moonlit lake, Rusalka has already fallen in love with a handsome prince (tenor, of course) who comes to swim in the lake where she dwells under a curse. One of the opera's musical highlights is Rusalka's Act I "Song to the Moon." Here, she expresses her half-wild nature in a lyrical, lilting aria that is a popular recital item for sopranos and the opera's most famous excerpt. Desperate to experience human sexual love and obtain a mortal soul, Rusalka turns to the witch Jezibaba (a plum character role for mezzo-soprano) for help. Jezibaba agrees to give her a magic potion that will turn her into a woman, but on two conditions: that she will be mute and that the prince will remain true.

Act II takes place at the royal court. Initially smitten with Rusalka despite her strange and silent demeanor, the Prince eventually rejects her after he falls in love with a more acceptable foreign princess (another soprano). In Act III, Rusalka returns in sorrow to her lake. The remorseful prince comes seeking her forgiveness. In a moving climactic duet, he begs her to kiss him, though he knows he will die if she does. They kiss passionately. The prince perishes and Rusalka, freed from her curse, disappears into the water.

Before "Rusalka," Dvorák (1841-1904) had composed nine operas. Most had not enjoyed particular success on the stage, however, because of clumsy librettos and arcane subject matter. In this universally loved fairy tale, which gave him ample opportunity to display the skill he had acquired in adapting Czech and Moravian folk song, Dvorák finally found the inspiration he needed to create emotionally persuasive characters. He also infused the score with a glowing impressionistic atmosphere that immerses us in the heroine's watery, shimmering, magical world from the first bar to the last.

The role of Rusalka is rewarding but daunting. For acclaimed soprano Marquita Lister, a graduate of the New England Conservatory, who is singing the role for the first time, one of the main difficulties is the Czech language. (The opera is being performed in Czech with English surtitles.)

"Czech is so formulated on consonants," Lister said recently. "There are words that have no vowels at all like smrt (death). The challenge is to add some shadow vowels in the right place. What draws me to the character of Rusalka is her courage. It takes a lot of courage to leave everything you know for love. And the opera shows us the unfortunate human impulse to destroy those things that we don't understand."

Conductor Ari Pelto, who conducted "La Boheme" at BLO in 2007 and has returned for "Rusalka," agrees that singing in Czech presents the singers with formidable challenges. "The cadences feel very different from what they are used to," he observed during a break from rehearsals. "Often the musical phrases end on unstressed beats, and the music follows the rhythm of the language very closely. The difficulty of singing in Czech is one of the main reasons that "Rusalka" is not as well known as it deserves to be. Because the music is wonderful"

What makes Dvorák's score so special is that it conveys equally well the two dimensions of Rusalka's personality - the water sprite and the woman, the magical and the human. "Are you a woman or a fairy tale?" the prince asks Rusalka. The charm of the opera is that we are never quite sure.