Richard Wagner began composing his Wesendonck Lieder in Zurich in the autumn of 1857. Originally conceived only for female voice and piano, the five songs were later orchestrated, first in 1893 by the Austrian conductor and composer Felix Mottl and later, in 1976, by the German composer Hans Werner Henze, in chamber music instrumentation. In fact, Wagner had already orchestrated a version of Träume for a chamber orchestra (with a violin taking the vocal part) in 1857 on the occasion of his wife Minna's birthday. Later, in 1870, for the 33rd birthday of his second wife Cosima, he performed a similar gesture: By mixing new motifs with themes from his Ring cycle, he composed the Siegfried Idyll and had it performed by a small orchestra as a birthday surprise. Hans Werner Henze's orchestration of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder emphasises the relationship between the words and the sounds. The agile yet intense scoring for ten winds, harp and a small string ensemble seems to be Henze's way of finding an alternative to the original piano without taking the cycle out of the realm of chamber music or changing the original image of the Lied. Salvatore Sciarrino's Languire a Palermo (Linger in Palermo) from 2018 is mainly based on the melody Tempo di Porazzi, a fragment Wagner composed during a visit to Sicily in late 1881 and early 1882.