February 1852: Richard Wagner meets Mathilde Wesendonck – an encounter from which an intimate love affair was to emerge that made music history. That the love was “forbidden” could not stop Wagner, and it was precisely the breaking of taboos that let him find entirely new paths in composition – guided by a woman who was meant to remain in the shadows in every respect at the time.

Without his “first and only love”, Mathilde Wesendonck, whose poems he set to music, masterpieces such as “Die Walküre” and “Tristan und Isolde” would hardly have come into being in this form. “G. S. M.” – “Gesegnet sei Mathilde” (“Blessed be Mathilde”) he noted on the score of Die Walküre.

We invite you to an evening that brings this extraordinary relationship to life through letters, circumstances and music. You will hear Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder as well as rarely performed works that arose from this connection. And of course this story ends in drama – with Isolde’s Liebestod.

Themes: Wagner · Wesendonck Lieder · Conventions · Passion · Music history · Politics

World premiere: Salon Charlottenburg, Berlin, 25 October 2025