(III) Chamber.

An early string quartet in D major (1829) has not survived, and the so-called ‘Starnberg Quartet’, supposedly dating from the 1860s, has been shown to be a mythical creation (Voss, N1977, and Millington, I1992), despite a putative ‘reconstruction’ by Gerald Abraham published in 1947. The Adagio for clarinet and string quintet, formerly attributed to Wagner, is in fact by Heinrich Joseph Baermann, belonging to his Clarinet Quintet, op.23.

(IV) Solo voice and orchestra.

The only surviving works in this category are a series of interpolations for operas by other composers, all dating from Wagner’s prentice years. ‘Doch jetzt wohin ich blicke’, an effective display piece, was a new allegro ending for Aubry’s aria ‘Wie ein schöner Frühlingsmorgen’ in Marschner’s Der Vampyr, which Wagner was responsible for rehearsing in Würzburg (1833). He opened his first season as music director of the theatre in Riga (1837) with Carl Blum’s comic opera Mary, Max und Michel, for which he composed an extra bass aria entitled ‘Sanfte Wehmut will sich regen’. Another bass aria, composed for insertion in Joseph Weigl’s ‘lyrical opera’ Die Schweizerfamilie, is lost, while ‘Norma il predisse, O Druidi’ was intended to be sung by the celebrated bass Luigi Lablache (who politely declined) in Bellini’s Norma.

(V) Solo voice and piano.

Among Wagner’s earliest compositions are a set of seven pieces for either solo voice or chorus (or both) and piano for inclusion in a performance of Goethe’s Faust (1831). More significant is the group of songs Wagner wrote between 1838 and 1840, in the hope of making his reputation in Paris. The idea that celebrated singers should include these songs in their concerts came to nothing, however. Extase, La tombe dit à la rose and Attente (the first two of which exist only in fragmentary form) were all settings of poems by Victor Hugo. Dors mon enfant and Mignonne, together with Attente, were published in Paris by Durand, Schoenewerk et Cie in 1870. Tout n’est qu’images fugitives is a setting of a poem entitled Soupir by Jean Reboul, while Les deux grenadiers sets a French translation of the poem by Heine, more famously set by Schumann. The song with the grandest operatic gestures of all is Adieux de Marie Stuart, evoking the tearful farewell to France of Mary Queen of Scots. Various of the above songs are included in recitals from time to time, but their fame is dwarfed by that of the Wesendonck Lieder, a set of five songs to texts by Mathilde Wesendonck (1857–8). Two of the songs were designated by Wagner ‘studies for Tristan and Isolde’: Im Treibhaus, which anticipates the bleak prelude to Act 3, and Träume, which looks forward to the Act 2 duet. As a birthday present for Mathilde, Wagner also arranged Träume for solo violin and chamber orchestra, and conducted it at the Wesendoncks’ villa in Zürich on 23 December 1857. The orchestral version of the other four songs generally performed today is by Felix Mottl, though Henze also made a version of the complete set – a more radical but sensitive rescoring – in 1976.