page_title: The Wood Nymph
section_title: Third section
hierarchical_section_title: The Wood Nymph / Structure / Third section
context_page_description: The Wood Nymph, Op. 15, is a programmatic tone poem for orchestra composed in 1894 and 1895 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The ballade, which premiered on 17 April 1895 in Helsinki, Finland, with Sibelius conducting, follows the Swedish writer Viktor Rydberg's 1882 poem of the same name, in which a young man, Björn, wanders into the forest and is seduced and driven to despair by a skogsrå, or wood nymph. Organizationally, the tone poem consists of four informal sections, each of which corresponds to one of the poem's four stanzas and evokes the mood of a particular episode: first, heroic vigor; second, frenetic activity; third, sensual love; and fourth, inconsolable grief.
  The Wood Nymph was performed three more times that decade, then, at the composer's request, once more in 1936. Never published, the ballade had been thought to be comparable to insubstantial works and juvenilia which Sibelius had suppressed until the Finnish musicologist Kari Kilpeläinen 'rediscovered' the manuscript in the University of Helsinki archives, "[catching] Finland, and the musical world, by surprise".
context_section_description: Björn encounters and is seduced by a beautiful wood nymph (skogsrå). The sensual, midsummer-night music in C-sharp major is "bathed in an erotic afterglow"; a solo cello cantilena, joined by horn and pizzicato strings, representing the nymph's erotic advances. "Who could resist," Glenda Dawn Goss has written in mock defense, "her [the nymph's] throaty solo cello voice, her sensuously swaying movements, a white limb glimpsed, honey-smooth, beneath a moon-white gown, a sweetly heaving breast?"
caption: The theme of a mortal man (in this case the sleeping Hylas), seduced and doomed by a supernatural female is an enduring theme in folklore and art. Here is Hylas with a Nymph, 1893, by John William Waterhouse[24]
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