Productions of Rusalka come in two varieties: the picturesque traditional and the psychologically probing. This DVD from Munich goes for option two. There is nothing remotely picturesque or traditional about Martin Ku≈ej’s production. Forget Dvorák’s moonlit fairy-tale. The opera effectively becomes the story of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who held his daughter captive and raped her.

At first, the new scenario seems to fit well. The downtrodden Fritzl (the Water Goblin in Dvorák’s original) lives in a miserable house decorated with a mural of an Alpine lake. In the cellar his imprisoned daughter, Rusalka, splashes around in the dank ground water and dreams of escape. But the emotional logic soon goes awry: Dvorák’s fable demands that Rusalka must find the outside world more hostile than her family home, so Ku≈ej plunges her into a bizarre and threatening environment, where she watches a deer getting flayed in a kitchen and transsexual wedding revellers clutching blood-soaked animals. Who is the Prince in this version of the tale? And why does everybody, including Rusalka and her father, end up in a lunatic asylum?

The grim modern tale is acted out with undeniable intensity. Kristı¯ne Opolais’s Rusalka may not have the vocal beauty of some but she gives her all in a moving portrayal. As the Prince, Klaus Florian Vogt is almost perfectly cast, capturing equally the poetic naivety and Wagnerian grandeur of Dvorák’s music. There could be no more frightening Fritzl/Water Goblin than Günther Groissböck and the able cast also includes Janina Baechle as a slut of a JeΩibaba and Nadia Krasteva as the Foreign Princess. The conductor, Tomá≈ Hanus, paces the score with urgency. In the end, though, Ku≈ej’s production has to force the original story too hard to get it into its modern straitjacket. The more one thinks about it, the less this Rusalka makes sense. Other DVD options – Fleming at the Opéra Bastille or the old ENO production (in English), both played as psychological allegories – are preferable.