Apollo and Daphne earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger! Let me be free of this man from this moment forward!" Peneus answered her plea and “a heavy numbness [seized] her limbs; her soft breasts [were] surrounded by a thin bark, her hair [changed] into the foliage, her forearms [changed] into branches; her foot, just now swift, now [clinged] because of sluggish roots.” She was turned into a laurel tree. Apollo vowed to honor her forever: “Always my hair will have you, my lyres will have you, my quivers will have you, laurel tree. You
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