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The Wesendonck Lieder is a song cycle composed by Richard Wagner while he was working on Die...

The Wesendonck Lieder 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 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 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 (German for Asylum), 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 the conceiving of Tristan und Isolde; there is certainly an influence on Mathilde's poems as well. The poems themselves are in a wistful, pathos-laden style influenced by Wilhelm Müller, the author of the poems used by Schubert earlier in the century. But the language is more rarefied and intense as the Romantic style had developed. Wagner himself called two of the songs in the cycle