When Wagner fled Germany for Zurich after taking the wrong side in the uprising of 1848, he had a steamer trunk full of music and a head full of ideas, but he had no money, no place to stay, and no love. He found all three when he found Otto Wesendonck, a rich silk merchant with a beautiful estate and an even more beautiful wife. By April 1856, Wagner and his all-but-estranged wife moved into the guest house on Wesendonck's estate and proceeded to make himself at home. By June 1857, he had dropped the massive, mythic Der Ring des Nibelungen for the more comely charms of Tristan und Isolde. By September, he had finished the libretto but realized he needed to develop a new chromatic musical language in order to express the endless erotic longing of Tristan. So he set about setting five love-sick poems by the now completely besotted Mathilde Wesendonck. Wagner set her Der Engel (The Angel) in November and then Schmerzen (Torments) and Träume (Dreams) in December. On December 23, Wagner arranged to have a small orchestra plus soprano premiere Träume beneath Mathilde's window as a serenade. With its images of heaven-sent dreams, ecstatic bliss and love, and death, and with its music of achingly chromatic melodies suffused with yearning suspensions set over voluptuous harmonies orchestrated with sumptuous opulence, the meaning of Wagner and Mathilde's Träume was surely clear to both spouses. Wagner's wife finally denounced the lovers in August 1858, breaking up the ménage a quatre along with her marriage and driving Wagner to Venice, where he finished Tristan alone and unloved. When Wagner reused the melody and harmonies of Träume as the basis of the Act II Love Duet from Tristan ("O Sink' hernieder, Nacht der Liebe"), he enshrined his love for in the greatest erotic opera of all time.

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After fighting for the losing side in the uprising of 1848, Wagner was forced to resettle in Zurich, where he set about doing the two things he did best: compose music and seduce women. Through the rich merchant Otto Wesendonck, Wagner had met his pretty young wife Mathilde and he quickly gained access to Otto's bank, his house, and finally, his wife. Although this arrangement didn't do much for Otto or for Wagner's wife, it did inflate Wagner's afflatus and he dropped Der Ring with its divinities for Tristan und Isolde and their sensualities. After finishing the libretto for Tristan in September 1857, Wagner discovered he needed to devise a new musical language to express endless erotic longing. Taking sentimental poems by Mathilde as his texts, Wagner created that language as he composed his sexual attraction for Mathilde into the best songs he ever composed. Wagner composed Stehe still (Be Still), the second of the Funf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck, in November 1857. Mathilde's text conflates Schopenhauer's yearning for oblivion with an obviously sexual longing for orgasm, and Wagner matches her with music that opens with restless passion, passes through torpidity to languidity to end with sublimated sexual ecstasy. Originally written for voice and piano, Stehe still was orchestrated by conductor Felix Mottl in 1880.

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Facing charges of armed insurrection in Germany for his role in the uprising of 1848, Wagner fled to Zurich where, thanks to his ability to part men from their money, he was well-established by the time he met Otto Wesendonck in 1852. From Wagner's point of view, Wesendonck had more to offer than merely his wallet: he had a guest house and a beautiful wife. It was just what Wagner needed. He and his wife moved in in April 1856 and, within a year, he started writing the libretto of his hymn to erotic love in three acts, Tristan und Isolde. But by September 1857, he realized he didn't know how to write music of sufficient sexiness, so with Mathilde's help, Wagner began composing what became the Funf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck in November 1857. The third song he wrote was Schmerzen (Torments) in December. A morbidly erotic song that joins love and death in passionate embrace, Wagner sets Mathilde's poem with highly charged chromatic music that starts with a cry of pain and ends with the bliss of ecstasy. Schmerzen was originally scored for voice and piano, but was orchestrated by conductor Felix Mottl in 1880.

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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 tonality, and mimetic text-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 tonal 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 recitative 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 tremolo 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 triad, which returns, transposed to the final tonic 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.

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Wagner met Otto Wesendonck in Zurich in 1852. By April 1856, Wagner moved into his guest house and moved in on his wife, Mathilde. By June 1857, he'd dropped Der Ring and its mythological profundities for Tristan und Isolde and its mystical sexualities. By September, he finished the libretto and started the music. By November, he figured out he didn't know how to write music that could fulfill the sexual yearnings of Tristan and he decided to devise a whole new chromatic harmonic language by composing songs setting poems of endless erotic longing by none other than Mathilde Wesendonck. The last of the Funf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck was Im Treibhaus (In the Hot House) composed in May 1858. Mathilde's poem describes the sorrows of separation that Wagner embodies in melodies of heartbroken loneliness and harmonies of infinite grief. When he came to compose the Prelude to Act III of Tristan, Im Treibhaus became the source of its aching, throbbing music. Originally scored for voice and piano, conductor Felix Mottl arranged the song for orchestra in 1880.

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Wagner, on the run from Germany after taking the losing side in the uprising of 1848, had resettled in Zurich, where he continued to fight for the one cause he really believed in: himself. To that end, he befriended the wealthy silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. Otto was useful: he had money he was willing to lend, a house on his estate he was willing to let, and a beautiful young wife named Mathilde whom he was willing to turn a blind eye to. By April 1856, Wagner and his wife were Otto and Mathilde's guests. By June 1857, Wagner dropped the mythology of Der Ring for the sexuality of Tristan and by September he had finished the libretto for all three acts. But after writing most of Act I, Wagner realized he needed to work out the achingly chromatic musical idiom of the rest opera. He worked it out by setting some of Mathilde's lovesick poetry to music. Der Engel, the first Wesendonck song, was composed in November 1857. Wesendonck's four-verse poem describes a solitary soul ravaged by sorrow finding release in the heaven-born embrace of a good angel. Wagner's music begins in an innocent, ethereal, and tonal light and ends in bliss-filled chromatic ecstasy. Der Engel was later polished as the first of the Funf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck. Originally scored for voice and piano, conductor Felix Mottl orchestrated it in 1880.

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