Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 08/26/2011, uploaded on 09/26/2011

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.

Third in the collection, though last to be composed, is “Im Treibhaus” (“In the greenhouse”). One of the songs Wagner designated as a “study,” the listener may recognize music from the prelude of Act III of Tristan und Isolde. The poet here muses over the loneliness of the exotic plants in the greenhouse and their separation from their native land, and finds in it a reflection of her own troubled soul. The opening motif of Wagner’s setting has a stifling air that captures with the ease the physical setting of the greenhouse but also further possesses a poignancy that conveys the poet’s lamentations. Sharing with Tristan Wagner’s signature chromatically-infused harmonic language, the composer’s penchant for tone painting comes to the fore towards the conclusion of the song. Tremolos in the piano capture the uneasy “stirring” that fills the room, and the dissonant clash of minor seconds, the drops of water that reflect the poet’s own tears.        Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.