The Water Goblins’aria from Rusalka

The Water Goblin in Rusalka is quite different from the central figure of the Water Goblin orchestral ballad. Although Jaroslav Kvapil, author of the libretto of Rusalka, shared Dvorák’s love of Erben's ballads, that is not where he found the story of the opera. He had taken his copy of Erben on holiday with him to the Danish island of Bornholm, where, he said, “impressions from Hans Christian Andersen, the love of my childhood days, and the rhythm of Erben’s ballads merged into one. This complex inspiration gave rise to a new fairy-tale about the love of the water nymph Rusalka for a prince – a human being – for whom she resolves to forsake her native lake.”

In fact, Rusalka has far more in common with Anderson’s Little Mermaid than anything in Czech folklore. Kvapil firmly believed, however, that what attracted Dvorák to his libretto was that there was so much of “the atmosphere of Erben’s ballads” in it. Certainly, Dvorák was uncommonly inspired by Kvapil’s poetry, as Rusalka’s famous “Hymn to the Moon” so clearly demonstrates. As for the Water Goblin, while he owes his existence in the opera to distant precedent in Czech folklore, he is no longer the evil figure we know from the orchestral piece but a father figure to Rusalka. He disapproves of her desire to be transformed into a human being but helps her achieve it. In the midst of the betrothal festivities at the castle he emerges from the lake to warn Rusalka that she will inevitably lose the Prince and that, as a mortal, she will not be able to go back to her former life either. “Woe! Woe! Poor wan Rusalka,” he sings in his second-act aria, where two episodes of eloquently compassionate vocal melody are each preceded by brief but dramatically scored premonitory interventions from the orchestra.