Wagner composed Eine Sonate für das Album von Frau M.W.—that is, for his muse Mathilde Wesendonk—in 1853. Wesendonk famously inspired Wagner to break off his work on the epic 'Ring' cycle to create his opera Tristan und Isolde. Before composing that seminal masterpiece, Wagner wrote several song settings of Wesendonk’s poetry, two of which he explicitly identified as “studies” for Tristan. A year after they first met in 1852, Wagner composed a one-movement Sonata in her honour; this was his first completed work since composing Lohengrin some six years earlier, and was written some months before he embarked on the first opera of the 'Ring' cycle, Das Rheingold. In the manuscript copy of the Sonata he gave Mathilde, he wrote the words 'Wisst ihr wie das wird?' ('Do you know what will become of this?'), the question posed by the Norns in the Ring cycle’s final opera, Götterdämmerung.

from notes by Daniel Jaffé © 2014