Apollo and Daphne will be present to two Latin places when the happy voice will sing a triumph and they will visit the great ceremonies at the Capitoline Hill.” Apollo also used his powers of eternal youth and immortality to render Daphne evergreen. For this reason, the leaves of the Bay laurel tree do not decay. Between 1622 and 1625, Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted a Baroque life-sized marble statue entitled Apollo and Daphne. Apollo clutches Daphne's hip, pursuing her as she flees to escape him. Apollo wears a laurel crown, and Daphne is portrayed halfway through her metamorphosis into the laurel tree with
The Wood Nymph the "erotic harmonic vocabulary" of "Tristan und Isolde" in the third section and the "motive of the forbidden question" from "Lohengrin" in the funereal march from the finale. In light of Sibelius's "Nietzschean response" to Wagner's operas (initially enamored, Sibelius by July 1894 had repudiated Wagner's ideas as "calculated" and "manufactured"), such observations are of particular interest in that they illustrate the extent to which Sibelius, at the time of "The Wood Nymph", had not yet succeeded in breaking with the German master. A few musicologists have speculated that "The Wood Nymph" is potentially autobiographical. Murtomäki, most notably, has argued