Wagner: Wesendonk Lieder, songs (5) for voice & piano (or orchestra), WWV 91

Richard Wagner's settings of Mathilde Wesendonk's Fünf Gedichte, which date from November 1857 to May 1858, are not merely by-products of the composer's predilection for uniting words and music; they are documentation of an intimate friendship between the married poet, whose husband more than once kept the financial wolf from Wagner's door, and the composer. The Wesendonk-Lieder have their origins in Wagner's period of intense work on Tristan und Isolde (1857-60). Indeed, Wagner designated two of the Wesendonk-Lieder, "Im Treibhaus" and "Träume," as "studies" for Tristan. Although the exact nature of the Wagner/Wesendonk friendship will likely remain unclear, it is tempting, especially in view of Wagner's usual romantic modus operandi, to view the love story of Tristan and the serenely metaphysical textual and musical union in the Wesendonk-Lieder as reflections of a real-life love story.
Wagner's sensitivity to Wesendonk's poetry manifests itself musically in symbolic harmonic progressions, progressive onality, and mimetic ext-painting. In "Der Engel," the piano accompaniment depicts the contrast between heavenly angels and earthly cares: series of ascending arpeggiated chords reach upwards at the mention of angels, and repeated eighth note chords plod earthbound when the singer sings of fear, worry, and floods of tears. The plagal harmonic gesture Wagner weaves into the harmonic fabric of the song, and which he states most clearly in the piano postlude, underscores the religious implications of the idea of heavenly redemption in Wesendonk's text. If the imagery of "Der Engel" suggests infinity, in "Stehe still!" time, always in motion, is the "measure of eternity." Wagner's piano writing appeals to the tradition of work-music in the vein of Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade, in which driving rhythmic activity depicts the toils of labor. The large-scale onal shift from C minor to C major underscores the mood shift in the text: joy, not time, is measured when two souls unite. The mutual understanding of the united souls transcends words. Wagner composes music that represents silence by gradually reducing the activity of the piano part to a
ecitative texture of sustained chords beneath speech-like declamation. A greenhouse is the backdrop for "Im Treibhaus," in which Wesendonk paints the image of palm branches reaching longingly into thin air only to grasp a desolate emptiness. One recognizes the melodic motive that permeates this song in even the opening measures of Tristan. Wagner's skill as tone poet is also apparent in his use of remolo in the piano part to depict the whispering that "anxiously fills the dark room," and in his use of repeated D-E flat dyads to represent drops of water falling on leaves. In "Schmerzen," the sorrows and joys of life are allegorized in the image of the daily setting and rising of the sun. Again, a large-scale shift from C minor to C major tracks the psychological progression from sorrow to bliss: indeed, the text tells us that sorrow is the source of joy. Wagner divides the two eight-line sections of text in his setting by a brief fanfare gesture -- an arpeggiated B flat major riad, which returns, transposed to the final onic C major, to close the song. In a letter of September 28, 1861, to Mathilde Wesendonk, Wagner wrote that his musical setting of "Träume" was "finer than all I have made!" He indicates that this song was the source of the night scene from the second act of Tristan. Indeed, the kinship is unmistakable. The descending whole-tone motive that hovers above ethereal harmonies is a sigh released as one abandons worldly concerns in spirit-redeeming dreams before taking permanent leave through death. The intersection of death and otherworldly bliss will resound most famously in Tristan. ~ Jennifer Hambrick, All Music Guide