Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo

Though acknowledged everywhere as one of the greatest musicians of his day when he was appointed music director of the Court of Weimar - and so put in charge of the ducal orchestra - Liszt had to admit to one major disadvantage. He had little experience of conducting and still less of writing for orchestra. As it happened, one of his earliest duties was to provide an overture for Goethe’s tragedy Torquato Tasso to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth in August 1849. Since Goethe was one of Weimar’s great luminaries Liszt could scarcely avoid the task and had to call on August Conradi to orchestrate the overture for him. It was from this unpromising beginning that, by way of an intervening version scored with the help of Joachim Raff, Liszt gradually developed and orchestrated himself the Tasso we now know. When it was first performed in Weimar in 1854 it was no longer an “overture” but, after the addition of a new episode in the middle of the piece, a “symphonic poem”- a term devised by Liszt to describe an orchestral form he had himself invented and which he was to furnish with no fewer than twelve examples during his thirteen years in Weimar.

Actually, Liszt’s Tasso has little to do with Goethe’s play. He makes it fairly clear in a preface to the score that Byron’s treatment of the Tasso theme in The Lament of Tasso influenced him at least as much. Apart from that, it was his instinct as a composer to avoid an unhappy ending. As the full title of the work indicates, he set out to convert Tasso’s misery into a triumph. History was on Liszt’s side in this respect. The Italian poet Torquato Tasso certainly did suffer a mental breakdown after he had handed over his epic masterpiece, Jerusalem Delivered, to his patron Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara in 1575, as he does in Goethe’s play. And, as in Byron’s poem, he did have ample cause to lament his confinement in the asylum of Santa Anna in Ferrara. After decades of torment, however, he experienced the triumph of being appointed Poet Laureate to Pope Clement VIII - even though his pleasure in the honour was somewhat marred by his death the day before the crowning ceremony was due to take place.

Liszt’s symphonic poem is constructed in four main sections. The slow (Lento) introduction, with its melancholy drooping figures on strings and woodwind, and the sudden (Allegro strepitoso) outbreak of violence represent Tasso’s suffering. The second main section (Adagio mesto) evokes, according to the composer, Tasso’s ghost as it haunts the lagoons of Venice - where for centuries, apparently, the gondoliers sang verses from Jerusalem Delivered. The sadly expressive melody introduced by bass clarinet to the sombre accompaniment of horns and harp is a memory of one such gondoliers’ song heard in Venice by Liszt himself. Taken up by violins and varied by a solo cello, it meets the melancholy figures from the introduction but then, as if in anticipation of Tasso’s final triumph, it is presented as a comparatively brisk and cheerful march on two trumpets.

Before Tasso can enjoy his victory, however, Liszt interpolates a charming pastiche (Allegretto mosso con grazia) depicting the poet at the Court of Ferrara, where the gondoliers’ melody is transformed into a graceful minuet tastefully scored for an orchestra reduced to chamber proportions. But this section runs into trouble too, in the form of the (Allegro strepitoso) violence from the introduction, and droops into renewed chromatic melancholy. Tasso’s change of fortunes is signalled by fanfares on trumpets and horns, upward rushing figures on the strings and the first of several march-time variants of the gondoliers’ tune, all of which - not least a grandiloquent and massively scored Moderato pomposo - communicate the same triumphant message.

Gerald Larner ©2004