Liszt's "Tasso"

Continuing my series of program notes

Ferenc Liszt

(1811-1886)

Tasso: lament e trionfo, S96/R413

Miklos Barabas's portrait of Liszt, 1847

In 1848 the Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt became ‘kapellmeister-in-extraordinairy’ in Weimar. Having spent the past 25 years as a travelling virtuoso, he could now concentrate on orchestral and other composition.

In Weimar, Liszt was kept busy. He was also conductor of the orchestra and opera house (he premiered Wagner’s Lohengrin, for example). There also, with a dozen or so orchestral works, he established the ‘symphonic poem’, his unique contribution to musical form.

By ‘symphonic poem’, Liszt meant music inspired by something (be it painting, poem, real event) outside the realm of pure exposition of sound. Liszt’s use of the term, however, meant, not a literal telling in music of subject matter that might have been better expressed in another medium, but, ‘a preface added to a piece of instrumental music, by means of which the composer intends to guard the listener against a wrong poetical interpretation, and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the whole or to a particular part of it’.

In following the ‘poetical idea’, Liszt succeeded in liberalising classical form. He effectively created a hybrid in which a single-movement sonata form contained within itself the structural demarcations of a whole symphony. Single-movement unity was created by recycling a small pool of themes; symphonic development by the imaginativeness with which Liszt varied those limited themes (what came to be called ‘thematic transformation’). 
The ‘poetical idea’ behind Liszt’s symphonic poems often related to a hero waging a struggle, like Hamlet (another of his subjects), against a sea of troubles. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), author of La Gerusalemme liberate (Jerusalem Liberated), seems to have suffered some sort of mental illness which placed him, for a time, in St. Anne’s lunatic asylum. Upon release he was befriended by Pope Clement VIII and his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini, but died before the pope could crown him ‘king of poets’.

The initial impulse behind Liszt’s ‘poem’ was to provide an overture to the play Torquato Tasso by one of Weimar’s favourite sons, Goethe, during the centenary celebrations of Goethe’s birth, 1849. Liszt preferred Byron’s version of the story, but, in a preface to his score, said: ‘Byron has not been able to join to the remembrance of the bitter sorrows so nobly and eloquently expressed in his Lamentation that of the Triumph, which a tardy but brilliant justice was reserving for the chivalrous author of Jerusalem Liberated.’
Liszt’s first sketch for this work is dated August 1, 1849, but the principal theme is one he heard in Venice several years earlier and which he claimed gondoliers sang to Jerusalem Liberated’s first two lines:

Canto l’armi pietose e’l Capitano,

Che’l gran Sepulcro libro di Cristo!

[I sing the sacred armies, and their leader,

That the great sepulchre of Christ did free …]

Though an audience can most immediately experience the work as a seamlessly single entity, a listing of tempo divisions reveals the work’s alternate reality in four movements. The opening theme of the Lento – Allegro strepitoso – Lento sounds like the sort of ruminating theme that would appeal to an improvising pianist. More fully-extended melody follows in the Adagio mesto. The Allegretto mosso con grazia with its triple-time figures is the equivalent of a third movement, while a percussive tattoo and shift to Allegro con molto brio signal the victory march of triumph.

Liszt prided himself on the fact that in Weimar he was contributing to the ‘music of the future’. Much of his immense piano innovation behind him, he now had ‘symphonic poem’ to oppose to the prestige of the standard symphony whose banner Brahms and his acolytes in Vienna continued to carry.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2011

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013 
Wagner's  Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013