Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 09/28/2011, uploaded on 03/22/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

With the help of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Rienzi was staged in Dresden in 1842 and Richard Wagner made a triumphal return to his German fatherland. In the succeeding years, two more operas were staged: Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser. However, Wagner’s associations with radical socialists in Dresden eventually caused him to have to abandon the city. In the aftermath of the failed May Uprising, arrest warrants were issued for the rebels. Though Wagner had only played a minor role, he was forced to flee the city or be arrested. He traveled first to Paris, but ultimately made his way to Zurich. Eventually, he and his wife took up residence in a small cottage on the estate of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck in 1857.

Safely away from those who would throw him in jail, and furthermore, his creditors, Wagner’s time with the Wesendonck’s became a critically important period for the composer. Mathilde was a poet and her poetry, if not her very self, became a source of inspiration for the composer. The extent of his friendship with Mathilde may never be known, and it is not impossible that the two may have carried on an affair, but either way her poetry served, in part, as a crucial element in the development of Wagner’s most revolutionary opera. From 1857 until 1860, Wagner worked intensely on Tristan und Isolde. During this time, he also set five of Mathilde’s poems to music, two of which he specifically designated as “studies” for the opera.

In the penultimate song, “Schmerzen” (“Anguish”), the sorrows and joys of life are likened to the setting and rising of the sun. Watching the sun sink below the distant horizon, the poet finds comfort in the fact that if it must endure the sorrow of night to bring forth the new day, her own sadness will bring forth an ever brighter joy. As in “Stehe, still,” Wagner uses a shift from C minor to C major to depict the opposing states of sorrow and joy. The piano announces the song’s principal motif, beginning with the strident clash of a major seventh, which is echoed quickly thereafter by the voice. At the close of the second stanza, where the sun is compared to a victorious hero (“Siegesheld”), the key changes from C minor to B-flat major and a fanfare motif depicts the rising star. Passing through E-flat and A-flat major during the final two stanzas, a triumphal C major is reached, by means of a deft modulation, only at the very end of the song. To close the song, Wagner restates again the heroic fanfare motif in the tonic key.    Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.