Ännchen von Tharau

"Ännchen von Tharau" is a 17-stanza poem by the East Prussian poet Simon Dach. The namesake of the poem is Anna Neander, the daughter of a person from Tharau, East Prussia. The poem was written on the occasion of her marriage in 1636 and had been set to music as a song by 1642.

Heinrich Albert set the poem to music, based on an earlier folk tune. Johann Gottfried Herder translated the words from East Prussian into standard German and published it in his collection of Volkslieder in 1778. The song is now known with a melody that Friedrich Silcher composed in 1827. Silcher used the first ten verses to form four stanzas: he combined verses 1+2, 4+5, 6+7, 8+9 for the first section, an eight-bar repeat with different text each time, and he used the third and tenth verses as an alternating refrain the final eight bars.