Tasso: lamento e trionfo

[1] He had heard the principal theme for Tasso in Venice, Italy several years earlier, however, using it in the 1840 version of his piano piece "Chant do Goldolier" in Venezia e Napoli.

This version was performed in Weimar, Germany on the centennial of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth as an overture to his drama Torquato Tasso.

[1] He adds: Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara, he was avenged at Rome, and even today lives in the popular songs of Venice.

To reproduce them in music, we first conjured up the great shade as he wanders through the lagoons of Venice even today; then his countenance appeared to us, lofty and melancholy, as he gazes at the festivities at Ferrara, where he created his masterworks ; and finally we followed him to Rome, the Eternal City, which crowned him with fame and thus pays him tribute both as martyr and as poet.

Even with this division, the entire work was actually a set of variations on a single melody—a folk hymn sung to Liszt by a gondolier in Venice in the late 1830s.

This was very much in the manner of Italian composer Pietro Raimondi, whose contrapuntal mastery was such that he had written three oratorios—titled Joseph, Potiphar and Jacob—which could be performed either individually or combined.