The Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91, is a song cycle composed by Richard Wagner while he was working on Die Walküre. This and the Siegfried Idyll are his only two non-operatic works that are still regularly performed. The Wesendonck Lieder were published under the title Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonk für eine Frauenstimme und Klavier in 1857 and 1858 by C. F. Peters.
The cycle is a setting of poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of Wagne...
More
The Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91, is a song cycle composed by Richard Wagner while he was working on Die Walküre. This and the Siegfried Idyll are his only two non-operatic works that are still regularly performed. The Wesendonck Lieder were published under the title Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonk für eine Frauenstimme und Klavier in 1857 and 1858 by C. F. Peters.
The cycle is a setting of poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of Wagner's patrons. Wagner had become acquainted with Otto Wesendonck in Zurich, 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 (German for Asylum in the sense of "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 of the first act of Die Walküre which Wagner was working on at the time, and...
Less
