Episode 51

We're sticking with German Diction again, with a crew of low-voiced men--basses Thorsten Grümbel and Georg Zeppenfeld, as well as baritone Christoph Pohl, return to discuss the texts to "Anakreons Grab" and "Wie Melodien zieht es mir". We concentrate on the long sentence structures in these poems, along with short unstressed closed Es and the vowel combination IE (which is usually [i:] but in these cases becomes [i:ə] or the transcription possibilities of [jə] or [iə]) at the end of a word. Goethe's "Anakreons Grab" refers to the ancient Greek poet, Anacreon--I also found a nice blog post entitled "What I like about this song". Klaus Groth's poem "Wie Melodien zieht es mir" is most famously set by Brahms (in fact, it's the opening music for the podcast!), but Charles Ives also set this poem, as well as 17 other German poems, several of which have been recorded by Thomas Hampson. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at [email protected]