Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91 (Wagner)
Movements
i Im Treibhaus ii Schmerzen
Notes
Wagner set five poems by Mathilde Wesendonck while he was working on his opera Tristan und Isolde. The songs, together with the Siegfried Idyll, are the two non-operatic works by Wagner most regularly performed. Mathilde Wesendonck was the wife of Otto Wesendonck, one of his patrons, whom Wagner met in Zürich, where he had fled on his escape from Saxony after the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849. For a time, Wagner and his wife Minna lived together in the Asyl (sanctuary), a small cottage on the Wesendonck estate. It is sometimes claimed that Wagner and Mathilde had a love affair; in any case, the situation and mutual infatuation certainly contributed to the intensity in the conception of Tristan und Isolde.
