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The mermaid Melusine, part human and part mythical creature, is an archetypal literary and musical figure that appears in many sources and has for centuries inspired countless artists to produce works of poetry, music, and painting. In every one of Aribert Reimann's music theater works to date, there are strong, mysterious women who play a central role, and Melusine is perhaps the most poetic of them. This creature caught between two worlds belongs at first completely to Nature, yet through the threatened loss of this natural world, she is transformed into a human being, a transformation that will be her undoing. Leaving water's magical realm, she attracts the element of fire by accepting her fate with the first human being she is able to love.