Forgiving all

The Wagners and the Wesendoncks met in Zurich in 1852. Richard and Minna Wagner had not been there for long; the failure of the Dresden uprising in 1849 had driven them into exile, first to Paris and then to the Swiss city. Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck, for their part, had also just arrived there from New York, where the wealthy businessman had business interests. They got along immediately, and it was not long before Otto became the patron of a perpetually cash strapped Wagner, who at that moment, after the premiere of Lohengrin—which he had had to leave in the hands of Franz Liszt—was working on a work as complex as Der Ring des Nibelungen. The relationship between the two couples grew stronger to the point that the Wagners moved, in April 1857, into a small house on the Wesendoncks’ new estate, and they themselves would move into the main house in August.

Something changed that summer, and here is where the speculation begins. According to his letters and writings, Richard fell head over heels in love with Mathilde, but nothing inappropriate happened; it was an impossible love. Mathilde was more discreet, or more cautious, and on her side there is no document that clarifies what their relationship was. There is little doubt, however, that she was the reason why, in mid-July, Wagner set aside the work he was then engaged in, Siegfried, to focus on a new one: in mid-August he began the libretto of Tristan und Isolde, and within a month he had finished it. The reading he gave before a group of friends, among them the Wesendoncks, impressed Mathilde, and if she had been Richard’s muse, now the roles were changing, because she began to develop (or at least to share) her poetic vein.

In November she showed the composer a poem that a few days later would become the lied Der Engel; in early December another poem arrived that would become another song, Träume; the third, Schmerzen, followed shortly afterwards, and the fourth (Stehe still) and the fifth (Im Treibhaus) arrived in February and April 1858, respectively, when Wagner returned from a stay in Paris. At that time the relationship between Minna and Richard was strained and, worse still, her jealousy placed the Wesendoncks in an awkward position. I suppose the situation must have become increasingly burdensome, and in August the Wagners left Das Asyl (as the little house was called), and he left for Venice—without this implying a definitive break with the Wesendoncks—with the score of the first act of Tristan and Isolde under his arm. He would send the complete opera to his publisher in March 1859.

Wagner revised the five songs we now know as the Wesendonck Lieder and premiered them in July 1862; by then he had already sold them to his publisher, who rubbed his hands with glee at their success. Their success then and their continued success now, because the work is one of the essentials of the repertoire. In modern terms, we could refer to Wagner, in the realm of lieder, as a one-hit wonder, that is, someone who is very famous for a single work, while we can barely recall the name of any other. Both the songs composed in 1832 with texts from Goethe’s Faust and those composed around 1840, when he was struggling to make a name for himself in Paris, are performed only occasionally, and afterwards he wrote no more.

The Wesendonck Lieder are an extraordinary cycle, and not only musically; it is the only work, since the Paris songs, precisely (if I am not mistaken), that he did not compose from one of his own texts. In a letter to Franz Liszt during the months at the Asyl, he says that he has received some poems that “he had to set to music,” something that “he never happened to.” More or less the definition of a lied, isn’t it? And not only did he feel the imperative need to do so, but he was very proud of those songs, as he also wrote to Liszt.

Of the five lieder in the cycle, we have heard here all except one, Träume, the second in order of composition and the last in order of publication. The atmosphere of the poem and, above all, the music lead us to the second act of Tristan und Isolde, when the lovers invoke the night (“O sink’ hernieder…”). In the score Wagner sent to the publisher he added, under the title, “Studie zu Tristan und Isolde” (he also had this added to Im Treibhaus); this would imply that he composed the song already thinking of the opera, but it cannot be ruled out that the opposite was the case: that when composing that fragment of the opera he remembered the song and incorporated it. The fact is that the two pieces are now linked in such a way that when we hear one it calls the other to mind.

Wagner wrote and published the Wesendonck Lieder for voice and piano, and he orchestrated only one of them, Träume, for which he made a version for violin and chamber orchestra as a birthday present for Mathilde, a version he published many years later. The orchestration of the complete cycle that we usually hear is the one made in 1880 by Felix Mottl, a great connoisseur of the composer’s work, with Wagner’s approval. It will be the version of Träume that we will hear today, performed by Lise Davidsen and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. And why this song and this singer? Let's say we're feeling in Barcelona a kind of Wagnerian electricity in the air during these first days of the year...