For the Weimar centennial anniversary of Goethe's birth, August 28, 1849, Liszt composed his Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo. And this stands second in order of his symphonic poems. At the Weimar festival the work preceded Goethe's Tasso, being played as an overture.
When the first part of this Tasso symphonic poem was written—there are two parts, as you will see later—Liszt was not yet bold as a symphonic poet, for he thought it necessary to define the meaning of his work in words and thus explain his music.
Liszt's preface to Tasso is as follows: "I wished to define the contrast expressed in the title of the work, and it was my object to describe the grand antithesis of the genius, ill-used and misunderstood in life, but in death surrounded with a halo of glory whose rays were to penetrate the hearts of his persecutors. Tasso loved and suffered in Ferrara, was avenged in Rome, and lives to this day in the popular songs of Venice. These three viewpoints are inseparably connected with his career. To render them musically I invoke his mighty shadow, as he wanders by the lagoons of Venice, proud and sad in countenance, or watching the feasts at Ferrara, where his master-works were created. I followed him to Rome, the Eternal City, which bestowed upon him the crown of glory, and in him canonised the martyr and the poet.
"Lamento e Trionfo—these are the contrasts in the fate of the poet, of whom it was said that, although the curse might rest upon his life, a blessing could not be wanting from his grave. In order to give to my idea the authority of living fact, I borrowed the form of my tone picture from reality, and chose for its theme a melody to which, three centuries after the poet's death, I have heard Venetian gondoliers sing the first strophes of his Jerusalem:
Canto l'armi pietose e'l Capitano,
Che'l gran Sepolcro liberò di Cristo.
"The motif itself has a slow, plaintive cadence of monotonous mourning; the gondoliers, however, by drawling certain notes, give it a peculiar colouring, and the mournfully drawn out tones, heard at a distance, produce an effect not dissimilar to the reflection of long stripes of fading light upon a mirror of water. This song once made a profound impression on me, and when I attempted to illustrate Tasso musically, it recurred to me with such imperative force that I made it the chief motif for my composition.
"The Venetian melody is so replete with inconsolable mourning, with bitter sorrow, that it suffices to portray Tasso's soul, and again it yields to the brilliant deceits of the world, to the illusive, smooth coquetry of those smiles whose slow poison brought on the fearful catastrophe, for which there seemed to be no earthly recompense, but which was eventually, clothed in a mantle of brighter purple than that of Alfonso."
Following this came—in later years, it is true—a strange denial from Liszt himself. He admitted that when finally his Tasso composition began to take form Byron's Tasso was nearer his heart and thoughts than Goethe's. "I cannot deny," he writes, "that when I received the order for an overture to Goethe's drama the chief and commanding influence on the form of my work was the respectful sympathy with which Byron treated the manes of the great poet."
Naturally this influence could not have extended beyond the Lamento since Byron's poem is only the Lament of Tasso, and has no share in the Trionfo. Now the anti-programmites could make a very strong case out of this incident, and probably would have done so long before this if they had known or thought about it. But then this question of the fallibility of programme music is an eternal one. Was it not the late Thayer, constantly haunting detail and in turn haunted by it, who could not abide Beethoven's Coriolanus in his youth because he only knew the Shakespeare drama and could not fit the Beethoven overture to it simply because it would not be fitted? And now some commentators declare that Beethoven must have known the Shakespeare work, that he could not have found his inspiration in the forgotten play of Von Collin.