(Born May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germany; died February 13, 1883, in Venice)
Born in the Jewish quarter of Leipzig, Richard Wagner was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service. Carl died of typhus only six months after Richard's birth, and shortly thereafter, Joanna (Richard's mother) moved in with her husband's friend, the playwright Ludwig Geyer. (No record of there ever marrying exists, but has been theorized that Geyer was actually Richard Wagner's biological father. Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer until the age of fourteen.
Otto Wesendonck became an important figure in Wagner's life once Wagner was grown and married. Otto a silk merchant, and his poet wife, Mathilde, were living in a local Zurich hotel (Hotel Baur au Lac) while a mansion was being built for them; the Wagners (Richard and Minna) coincidentally were staying at the same hotel at the same time. The four became friends. The Wesendoncks were very impressed with Wagner's music and sympathized with his political tendencies. For Wagner, the attraction was in the relationship he made with Matilde. Wagner wrote to a friend, "A rich young merchant, Wesendonck... settled down at Zurich some time ago and in great luxury. His wife is very pretty and seems to have caught some enthusiasm for me." When Otto began funding Wagner's musical pursuits, the composer wrote his Piano Sonata in A flat major in honor of Matilde. In 1857, when the Wesendonck's villa was completed, Otto rented a cottage on the grounds of their new home to the Wagners.
When Otto was away, Richard had the run of the villa and used it to thrown parties and host his friends for long periods of time. Meanwhile, he began work again on his latest opera, Tristan und Isolde, in autumn 1857. The love triangle that was developing between him, his wife Minna, and Mathilde Wesendonck fed his creative instincts. Mathilde even provided practical assistance: every day Wagner read her what he had newly written of the libertto that day and sought feedback.
Simultaneously, the two had also begun working together on a new series of songs. She wrote poems that inspired Richard's music, and soon, he began to think of her as his muse and lover. She completed a set of five poems and, as each one was completed, she gave them to Richard, who immediately began setting them to music. She described his song writing as a "supreme transfiguration and consecration" of her words. The music of her songs was inextricably bound up with the score of Tristan und Isolde, particuraly the third and fifth songs in the series, "Im Treibhaus" and "Träume," elements of which would make their way into the Prelude to Act Three of the new opera. The song "Der Engel" took its inspiration from Das Rheingold.
The five-song collection that the two succeeded in creating was originally titled Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme ("Five Poems for a Female Voice"), though now it is known as the Wesendonck-Lieder. The cycle was unified by romantic pathos, combined with an elevated declamation of the vocal parts, and the piano accompaniment's expressive complex harmonies. It was premiered in 1862 in Mainz by soprano Emilie Genast with Hans von Bülow accompanying her on the piano at the residence of Scott, the publisher to whom Wagner had sold the cycle for a thousand francs two years before.
In Stehe Still, Mathilde writes of "Glowing sphere in distant space/Circling us with gravity," calling for "All sempiternal generation" to cease. Schmerzen vacillates between despair and optimism, concluding with a triumphant climax. In it, the singer accepts the duality of human existence: "If death alone gives birth to life/ And only torment can bring joy/ How grateful am I for such torment/ As Nature does in me deploy." Finally, the fatalism of Schmerzen yields to the idealism of Träume, in which Matilde looks to the mind to provide succor. In Träume, Wagner wrote the gentlest music of the song cycle and also orchestrated it for an ensemble rather than scoring it for just piano and voice.
When Richard arranged the first Träume performance for the morning of Mathilde's 29th birthday, Otto was away, tending to business matter in New York. Wagner had paid for the chamber ensemble that played music using Otto's money, and when his patron returned, Wesendonck was understandably upset. Wagner arranged for another concert performance in the villa to placate the businessman (this concert only included movements from Beethoven's symphonies) but by then, the relationship between the two men had soured. A description of a typical evening in the house a few months later might illustrate what made Otto uncomfortable: the conductor Hans von Bülow came to visit with his new wife Cosima (who was Liszt's illegitimate daughter). That evening, Richard read the party his Tristan libertto. The audience included his wife, Minna, his current romantic interest Mathilde, and Cosima, with whom he would later have two children while she was still married to von Bülow.
Things completely dissolved in April of the following year when Minna found a letter that Wagner had sent to Mathilde, in which he praised her as an angel and declared his profound love for her. Minna confronted Matilde with the letter and showed it to her husband, after which the Wagners decided to leave. Richard chose to go to Venice, while Minna picked Dresden in which to allow her nerves to settle down. The Wagners' marriage never recovered, with Richard not even attending her funeral when Minna died in 1866. Most incredibly, however, the relationship between Richard and Otto somehow was sustained, the merchant contributing to the composer's Bayreuth festival project (although, when Richard asked to be allowed to stay at Otto's cottage again a few years later, Otto refused to grant his request).
The Wesendonck songs, originally written for female voice, have also been sung by tenors through the 20th and 21st century. While they were still in touch, Wagner wrote to Mathilde of their lieder series: "I have not written anything better than these songs and very few of my works will be remembered besides them." While history has proved him wrong, the Wesendonck Lieder stand out as an absorbing document of Wagner's complex relationships.
The cycle has several versions. Wagner initially wrote the songs for female voice accompanied only by piano, but produced an orchestrated version of Träume, to be performed by chamber orchestra beneath Mathilde's window. The orchestration of all five songs for large orchestra was made by Wagnerian conductor Felix Mottl. In 1972, Italian composer Vieri Tosatti entirely re-orchestrated the songs, and in 1976, German composer Has Werner Henze produced a chamber version, wherein each of the players has a seperate part, with some very unusual wind registration.