Peter Bloom, Tracking ‘Träume’: The Sources and Sounds of Wagner's Wesendonck Lied

March 2014, Volume 8, Number 1, 19–39.

The tale has often been told, but I believe it is worth retelling in order to distil what we now know and to dwell upon what we appear – rare in the Wagnerian laboratory – not (yet) to have dissected to death. In order to track Wagner’s setting of Mathilde Wesendonck’s poem Träume, precise chronology is of the essence. Martin Gregor-Dellin’s assertion that Wagner conjured forth ‘the iridescent harmonies of Tristan as a setting for her poem Träume’, and Joachim Köhler’s claim that Träume begins with a ‘mute invitation’ from the love duet of the opera, will not quite do, as the music of ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe’ was drafted after the song was composed. In this brief study I should like, first, to review the historical circumstances in which Träume was written and set, and, second, to comment on the poem and its musical setting, and to trace its integration into the score of the opera.