Operas and fairy tales have a natural affinity, and no one knew this more than the great Czech composer Dvorak, who put many of his native folk tales to music. His best-known opera, the enchanting Rusalka, is a Czech version of the Little Mermaid tale familiar to many from Hans Christian Andersen and Disney. The pathos of Rusalka is balanced in this opera-story collection by the fairy-tale romance of “The King and the Charcoal Burner” and the roustabout farce of “Kate and the Devil,” in which a girl is saved by her own bad temper. Ian Krykorka, a new author (and the son of Vladyana), has drawn his retellings from the opera versions, although he alters details and emphasis in shaping the stories for this collection. For that reason, the book works better as a storybook rather than as a preparation for what young opera-goers might expect to see on stage.

Silver Moon is a beautifully produced book, with an introduction by novelist Josef Skvorecky on the music of Dvorak, and a four-page biography, both with attractive photos. Nonetheless, there are problems with the design. Sometimes the pictures are not well placed with the corresponding text, as when Kate is shown wearing jewels that don’t appear in the text until four pages later. Details of the stories, too, are sometimes confusing. Since the words of Rusalka’s song to the moon are included, printed music giving the melody would have been a welcome addition. The glory of the book is in the rich, luminous illustrations by the celebrated Czech-born Vladyana Krykorka. Trees, cloaks, bats, ripples on a pond, a girl’s long hair – all swirl in motion, giving a sense of a world in which nothing is fixed, but transformations and possibilities are unlimited.