Liszt's Tasso opens with a descending octaved theme in C minor, meant to depict the depressed mood and oppressed station of the poet. Wagner has made mention of Liszt's particular aptitude for making such musical moments pregnant with meaning. Here it expresses the tragedy of the poet's life, and a second theme is his agonised cry. Gradually this impatience is fanned to fury, and culminates in a wild outbreak of pain. The tragic first theme, now given fortissimo by the full orchestra and long sustained, spreads its shadow over all. The characteristic rehearsal of the themes concludes the introduction to the work.
With an adagio the principal motif is heard in full for the first time; it is the boat song of the Venetian gondoliers, and embraces in part the first tragic theme with which the composition opened. You recall what Liszt said about the expressiveness of this sombre song. He has heightened its gloom by the moody orchestration in which he has embedded it.
As a contrast comes the belief in self which forces its way to the soul of the poet, and this comes to our ears in the form of the noble main theme—the Tasso motif—which now sounds brilliantly in major. These two moods relieve one another, as they might in the mind of any brooding mortal, especially a poet.
The next picture is Tasso at the court of Ferrara. The courtly life is sketched in a minuet-like allegro and a courteous subsidiary. How aptly Tasso is carried away by the surrounding splendour we hear when the Tasso theme sounds in the character of the gay minuet. This theme becomes more and more impassioned, the poet has raised his eyes to Leonore, and the inevitable calamity precipitates itself with the recurrence of the wild and frantic burst of rage and fury.
Alles ist dahin! Nur eines bleibt:
Die Thräne hat uns die Natur verliehen,
Den Schrei des Schmerzes, wenn der Mann zuletzt
Es nicht mehr trägt.
With this, the first half of the first part of the work closes.
The second half concerns itself with the poet's transfiguration. His physical self has been sacrificed, but the world has taken up his cause and celebrates his works.
A short pause separates the two divisions. Now the glorious allegro has an upward swing, the former dragging rhythms are spurned along impetuously. The Tasso theme is glorified, the public enthusiasm grows apace, and runs to a tremendous climax in the presto. Then there sounds a sudden silence—the public pulse has ceased for a moment—followed by a hymn, built on the Tasso theme. The entire orchestra intones this, every figure is one of jubilation, save the four double basses which recall the rhythm of the former theme of misery; but—notice the logic of the composer—its resemblance is only a distant one, and it is heard only in the lowest of the strings. So this composition concludes.
The Epilogue to the Tasso symphonic poem was written many years afterward. Liszt called it Le Triomphe funèbre du Tasse, and its first performance was under Leopold Damrosch in New York in 1877. The subject must have pursued Liszt through most of his life, and he seems to have felt a certain affinity with the dead poet. We all know that the public denied him credit for his compositions.