This is the theme—a typical one—which Liszt transforms, ‘according to the changing conditions,’ to delineate his hero’s struggles, the heroic character of the man; his determination to achieve greatness; his ‘proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals at Ferrara’—the theme of the dance itself is developed from the Tasso motif:
and then his boisterous acclamation by the crowd in Rome:
And here, for a moment, the listener hides his face. For Liszt has become as cheap as any bar-room fiddler. His theme will not stand this transformation. It happens again and again in Liszt, this forcing of a theme into a mold in which it sounds banal. No doubt the acclamations of the crowd were banal (if Liszt intended it that way), but this thought cannot compensate a listener who is having his ears pained. It is one of the regrettable things about Liszt, whose best is very nearly equal to the greatest in music, that he sometimes sails into a passage of banality without seeming to be at all conscious of it. Perhaps in this case he was conscious of it, but stuck to his plan for the sake of logical consistency. (The most frenzied radicals are sometimes the most rigid doctrinaires.) The matter is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is one of the most characteristic faults of the great man. In the present case we are compensated for this vulgar episode by the grand ‘apotheosis’ which closes the work:
Such is the method, and it is in principle the same as that since employed by all composers of ‘symphonic poems’—of program music in fact.