“Ich komme – ich komme – grünende Brüder” from Daphne (1938)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

“Ich komme – ich komme – grünende Brüder” from Daphne (1938)

According to ancient Greek myth, the chaste Daphne is turned into a laurel tree by the gods to protect her from the advances ofApollo, who is in love with her. In Strauss’s opera the reasons for her transformation are rather more complicated but the basic fact is that she has always felt herself to be a child of nature rather than of man. In “Ich komme – ich komme – grünende Brüder” she welcomes her metamophosis as something she has long desired. Her ecstasy amid nature as she herself becomes part of it is beautifully expressed in Strauss’s finely detailed orchestral scoring, redolent with rustlng foliage and bird song, and in the soaring soprano line. Daphne’s last words are not, however, the last that is heard of her in the opera. After a blissful orchestral interlude she sings again but without words and, like the oboe in dialogue with her, as an instrument of nature.