The Silent Woman

Operatic characters live and die by their voice. However persuasive the performer’s acting or imaginative the mise-en-scene, it is through their singing that characters reveal their identity, and that we the audience are seduced to take interest in their story. Pity, then, poor Rusalka, whose longing to enter the world of adult sexuality can only be fulfilled at the expense of her powers of speech, and who is forced to endure the central act of her opera almost mute apart from its final moments. Only with her banishment to a shadowy underworld, and the fatal kiss that secures both the death of her lover and of her youthful illusions, can Rusalka sing again, and now of her pain. The price of expression is silence, and the only release to be found is eventually in death. Melly Sill is sensitive to these paradoxes, and in her highly…