The Mermaid

Opera «The Mermaid» by Dargomyzhsky is an actual in all times social drama: a simple girl Natasha abandoned by Prince, who decided to marry not for love, but for class etiquette. The heroine cannot live without her beloved and rushes into the waters of the Dnieper in despair. But the Prince also cannot forget his true love. Natasha’s death condemns everyone involved in this drama to disaster.

The literary basis of the opera was the eponymous unfinished drama by Alexander Pushkin, the final scenes were written by Dargomyzhsky himself, who was the author of the libretto. «The Mermaid» is known as the first Russian lyric-dramatic household opera, characters are literally taken from the real life. A new look at the folk theme, the realism of the images, the urgency of the plot and conflicts significantly distinguish this opera from the musical compositions of the mid-19th century.

Two worlds will be presented to the audience: real and fantastic — the underwater realm of mermaids. The artistic director of the opera Alexander Titel proposes to look at the underwater kingdom as at the projection of the inner world of a human: a bitter regret and an intense feeling of guilt make the ghost real.

In his opera, Dargomyzhsky strove above all for revealing the spiritual world of heroes and their characters that change under the influence of events and manifest themselves in a tense ensemble scenes. The same idea is served by the concise, figurative scenography of Vladimir Arefiev: the space of the stage will be filled with the dramatic experiences of the heroes.