Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 09/28/2011, uploaded on 03/22/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

With the help of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Rienzi was staged in Dresden in 1842 and Richard Wagner made a triumphal return to his German fatherland. In the succeeding years, two more operas were staged: Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser. However, Wagner’s associations with radical socialists in Dresden eventually caused him to have to abandon the city. In the aftermath of the failed May Uprising, arrest warrants were issued for the rebels. Though Wagner had only played a minor role, he was forced to flee the city or be arrested. He traveled first to Paris, but ultimately made his way to Zurich. Eventually, he and his wife took up residence in a small cottage on the estate of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck in 1857.

Safely away from those who would throw him in jail, and furthermore, his creditors, Wagner’s time with the Wesendonck’s became a critically important period for the composer. Mathilde was a poet and her poetry, if not her very self, became a source of inspiration for the composer. The extent of his friendship with Mathilde may never be known, and it is not impossible that the two may have carried on an affair, but either way her poetry served, in part, as a crucial element in the development of Wagner’s most revolutionary opera. From 1857 until 1860, Wagner worked intensely on Tristan und Isolde. During this time, he also set five of Mathilde’s poems to music, two of which he specifically designated as “studies” for the opera.

The final song, “Träume” (“Dreams”), was the second of Wagner’s “studies” for Tristan, and in it the listener will find an unmistakable similarity to the music of the love duet in Act II. Furthermore, “Träume” was the only song of the Wesendonck Lieder to be orchestrated by Wagner himself. He produced a version of the song, with chamber orchestra accompaniment, and performed it beneath Mathilde Wesendonck’s window on her birthday, 23 December 1857. Later, in a letter to Mathilde, he referred to the song as his finest creation for the voice. Indeed, the voice’s yearning and mesmerizing melody unfolds over luscious and ethereal harmonies that enchant the listener from the very first chord. A descending whole tone motif, a “sigh” full of heartfelt longing, opens and closes the song, accompanies the vocal melody and is interwoven with it. Towards the end, the vocal melody drifts away, like images in a dream, leaving nothing but the descending motif and an emotional ending that could not be expressed but in tone alone.    Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.