Love is a curse. Love is a compulsion. But to have loved with all one’s heart and soul, just once, as Rusalka discovers in Dvorák’s opera, is worth the curse of eternity. That sense of romantic self-sacrifice, especially when it involves the sublimation of a woman’s interests to a man’s, is out of fashion, but it is perfectly enshrined in Rusalka and vividly brought to life in Glyndebourne’s new production. Paradoxically, Dvorák’s opera itself is very much in fashion: no fewer than four UK companies have it in their sights, and I will be the last to complain – even when faced, as at Glyndebourne, with a staging that pretends there is nothing more to the piece than 19th-century poetic naturalism.

This show is not so much an interpretation, more a retelling of a fairy tale at face value, as if the director, Melly Still, expects us to believe the genie of the work’s rampant symbolism can somehow be stuffed back in the bottle. The water sprites dangle long fish tails. The wood nymphs resemble plump wenches. Jezibaba is a witch out of Grimm and Vodnik betrays a whiff of pantomime. The modesty of Rae Smith’s rotunda-set is camouflaged by the catwalk fashions of the Act Two party-goers, clearly designed to divert the Glyndebourne audience. But the supernatural scenes look horribly old-fashioned and there’s not an original idea all evening. It’s another case of a theatre director leaving their interpretative intelligence at the stage door the minute they set foot in an opera house.

That the production still makes an impact is due on one hand to the conducting of Jirí Belohlávek, who gives Dvorák’s prodigious symphonic motifs their due as surely as he paints the score’s Wagnerian colours, and on the other to the strongly acted performances of Ana María Martínez and Brandon Jovanovich. Throughout her long, tortuous silences, which she expresses with balletic intensity, Martínez makes us feel the painful palpitations of Rusalka’s heart, while Jovanovich’s Prince, masculine and eloquent, inspires her to a radiant Liebestod. Tatiana Pavlovskaya’s Foreign Princess is relegated to a bit-part, but Larissa Diadkova makes sure Jezibaba really scores. Culinary opera at its best? ★★★☆☆