Mermaids, those flashy-tailed water nymphomaniacs who lure men to aquatic doom, wrapped themselves around many an artist's imagination at the fin de siècle: Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Munch and eventually, in his white flannel trousers walking on the beach, J Alfred Prufrock himself ("I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each"). Their sinuous anatomies epitomised men's fantasies of feminine evil.
Dvorák succumbed to their siren call and composed his Rusalka - the name means water nymph - in 1900. Unlike his other long-neglected operas this has crept back into the repertoire, and opened last week in a rapturously received new production at Glyndebourne, directed by Melly Still, designed by Rae Smith and superbly conducted by Jirí Belohlávek, who relishes every nuance and Czech-Bohemian accent in this flowing score.
Many regard this work as a heart-breaking masterpiece. The rest of us - though amid the cheers last Sunday I would have had to amend that to "one or two of us" - find it charmingly melodic and frankly rather creepy, preferring the jubilant intensity of the tighter forms at which Dvorák excelled: his Slavonic Dances or string quartets.
The score echoes Wagner without the heft or imperative, Debussy without the primordial symbolist magic. The forest-lake setting, the hunter, the Valkyrie-like mermaid sisters, here aerially suspended and wriggling like huge white maggots in Smith's spooky, brackish designs, are the stuff and nonsense of Nordic legend.
Post-Freud and post-1960s, the subject has an air of fetid obsession and misogyny. This is why Rusalka is such a paradoxical work: a pretty fairytale in which the heroine has her voice silenced and her tail cut off, hobbling painfully on raw stubs to seek the love of a human. It may also be why Still and Smith have fixed the staging around 1959, on the brink of that sexual revolution, when it was just possible for little-girl nymphs in pleated skirts to waggle their bottoms in innocent pubescence. In contrast, the sophisticated women at the prince's ball belong to another world, parading slinky, bright-coloured minidresses shaped like puffballs and tulips.
This was the evening's most effective scene, in which the humiliated, watery Rusalka learns jealousy as she sees her prince carried off by a hot-blooded foreign princess. Ana María Martínez, in the title role, sang with accurate beauty, her cool detachment suited to this chilly subject matter. Brandon Jovanovich had reedy-toned elegance as the feckless Prince. Larissa Diadkova (the Witch) and Mischa Schelomianski (the Water-Sprite) offer fine support. The London Philharmonic excelled and the production was intelligent and bold. Glyndebourne has a sure-fire hit. If my pulse didn't race, it's my problem.
English National Opera's season climax was a new staging of Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin (Love From Afar), first seen in Salzburg in 2000. The prince-troubadour, Jaufre, idealises a far-off countess, Clemence, and travels to meet her only to die in her arms. The Tristan-like story, to a libretto by Amin Maalouf, ends with a religious transfiguration, the true "amour" being God.
With only three characters, the third a go-between, asexual Pilgrim (Faith Sherman), this is an evening of soliloquies and declamation, underpinned by Saariaho's finely textured, iridescent score which shimmers with arpeggiated harps and intricate, quarter-tone harmonies, lovingly shaped by the ENO's music director, Edward Gardner. Roderick Williams's Jaufre is intense, lyrical and tender, with Joan Rodgers pure-voiced as Clemence, dressed up too like a patchouli-drenched fortune-teller but radiant nonetheless.
Daniele Finzi Pasca's staging tries to match the layers of music with shadow actors, acrobats and a Loie Fuller-like dancer twirling swathes of cloth attached to long sticks. It's all very exquisite, but its dreamy mood is not the stuff of theatre. Many eyelids in the house drooped as the score and setting, both busily static, cancelled each other out while the eventless plot inched along. A new Harmonia Mundi recording, sung in the original French and conducted by Kent Nagano, is the best option for enjoying this sensuous score, preferably with the lights out.
In a week saturated with opera, the event that really flabbergasted was Covent Garden's intoxicating revival of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, nimbly conducted by Antonio Pappano with a stellar cast led by Juan Diego Flórez and, heroically ignoring what turned out to be a broken leg, Joyce DiDonato. Ferruccio Furlanetto's weirdly hilarious Don Basilio performed his "La calumnia" with spellbinding perfection.
DiDonato, even in pain, conjured spiky, gleaming coloratura and acid good humour as an ideal Rosina. Yet it was Flórez's Count who provoked near-hysteria. His final aria brought the show to a standstill for several minutes of whooping mayhem, with the entire auditorium, on stage and off, grinning and checking their watches in astonishment. Maybe it was the heat. Or Federer fever. That was the mood: joyous meltdown.