Wesendonck Songs (Wesendonck Lieder) orchestrated by Gustav Kuhn

In May 1848, Richard Wagner was immediately involved in the Dresden uprising and this effected a dramatic turn in his life. Until then a successful royal Kappelmaster in Saxony, with three operas produced in Dresden, now the musician was forced to flee to Switzerland as the police were in pursuit of him and he was threatened with imprisonment. Life in exile went hard. Wagner was reluctant to bind himself to a full-time employment and had to make a living on incidental earnings from literary work and occasional conducting appearances. Need was dogging him around and his personal life did not go well either: his wife Minna Planer developed a heart condition, and for a long time there had been no trace of their former love. The only support he encountered were the friends from his inner circle, whose finances the composer made use of in a most unceremonious manner. Among these friends were the Wesendoncks. Wagner met the rich silk trader Otto Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde in early 1852 in Zurich. Aware of Wagner's straitened financial situation, Wesendonck offered him hospitality in his mansion outside the city, and then built him a house in the vicinity. Wagner moved to this Green Hill Asylum in May 1857, which brought him even closer to Mathilde, who at the time had mothered a daughter and two sons. Mathilde Wesendonck was a very interesting character. Endowed with rare beauty and charm, with a sensitive and poetic soul, she wrote poetry and prose, drama and music and held Wagner's genius in great esteem. "What best I have known," Matilda recalls later, "I have received from Wagner." He shared his ideas with her, initiated her into Schopenhauer's philosophy and Beethoven's symphonies, and she was also the first listener of whatever music the composer produced at the time he was working on Die Walküre and Siegfried. Every evening Wagner played to Mathilde what he had written in the morning. Love flared between them, but Mathilde disclosed everything to her husband and assured him she would never abandon her family and children. She also became the inspiration behind Wagner's most original opera, Tristan and Isolde: as if a real-life reality repeated the situation from the medieval legend about overwhelming and unfulfilled love. The jealousy of his own wife forced Wagner to leave the Green Hill Asylum and in August 1858 the composer departed for Venice. The love for Mathilde Wesendonck is immortalized in the five songs written on poems by her during the same period – the only chamber-vocal composition of Wagner from his mature years. "I have not written anything better than these songs and very few of my works will be remembered besides them," says the composer. According to one of Wagner's German biographers, the sequence of composition of the songs illustrates very precisely the development of the love affair between the pair: on 30 November 1857 – The Angel; four days later – Dreams; on December 17 – Sorrows; on February 22, 1858 – Be still, on May 1 – In the Greenhouse. The Five Songs is a typically Wagnerian piece of music. Characterized by a romantic pathos, elevated declamation of the vocal part, saturation of the piano accompaniment with expressive complex harmonies and fluent form, the cycle was first introduced in 1862 in Mainz, at the residence of publisher Scott, to whom Wagner had sold it for 1,000 francs two years earlier, in the performance of soprano Emilie Genast with Hans von Bülow accompanying on the piano. No name was given for the author of the texts at the first publication; the name of Mathilde Wesendonck was not publicly revealed until after her death in 1902. The cycle has several versions. Wagner initially wrote the songs for female voice in accompaniment of piano alone, but produced an orchestrated version of Träume, to be performed by chamber orchestra beneath Mathilde's window on the occasion of her birthday, 23 December 1857, with the voice part given to a violin. Some of the songs are also performed by male singers: for example, Lauritz Melchior, Franco Corelli, Plácido Domingo, Jonas Kaufmann, Andrea Bocelli, and the bass Paata Burchuladze. There are those who have attempted the entire cycle in performance, including René Kollo and Stuart Skelton. 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 Hans Werner Henze produced a chamber version, wherein each of the players has a separate part, with some very unusual wind registration. Nowadays, the songs are performed in the order in which they were first published in 1862: 1. The Angel 2. Be still! 3. In the greenhouse 4. Sorrows 5. Dreams.