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From Allison Young, Host, Classical Music

Wagner, Piano Sonata in A, for the album of Frau Mathilde Wesendonck

I just came across a new piece to me — and a new piece of history that I had not known. Talk about romantic. It's a piano sonata by Richard Wagner and it was written for the great passion of his life; the one he confessed to his friends was "absolute love; the one who changed him from the inside out." She was the one who inspired him to write his greatest and most personal opera "Tristan und Isolde." Her name was Mathilde Wesendonck.