Since I just spent the weekend preparing for an upcoming Lieder recital with Mirko Roschkowski, of course I couldn't let him off the hook without talking some German Diction with us! This week's texts are two Schubert songs with mythological characters "Ganymed" (poem by Goethe) and "Der Atlas" (poem by Heinrich Heine). We concentrate on when NG is phonetically [ng] and not [ŋ], the prefixes UN- and AN- and review a few favorite topics like closed and open E's, glottals and the unvoiced genitive S.

Ganymede was the cup-bearer to the Gods, and maybe a lot more. There are many different opinions on the story behind this mortal-turned-deity, including these links from Theoi dot com, this commentary by Oxford  University Press and a German analysis of the Geothe poetry. Atlas was a second-generation Titan whose punishment for taking part in the Titan's war against the Olympian gods was having to support the heavens on his shoulders to keep the sky from crashing into the earth.

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