produced by Germany and England in the last century:  Goethe and Byron.  Upon Goethe was bestowed the most brilliant of mortal careers; while Byron’s advantages of birth and of fortune were balanced by keenest suffering.  We must confess that when bidden, in 1849, to write an overture for Goethe’s drama, we were more immediately inspired by Byron’s reverential pity for the shades of the great man, which he invoked, than by the work of the German poet.  Nevertheless Byron, in his picture of Tasso in prison, was unable to add to the remembrance of his poignant grief, so nobly and eloquently uttered in his ‘Lament,’ the thought of the ‘Triumph’ that a tardy justice gave to the chivalrous author of ‘Jerusalem Delivered.’  We have sought to mark this dual idea in the very title of our work, and we should be glad to have succeeded in pointing this great contrast,—­the genius who was misjudged during his life, surrounded, after death, with a halo that destroyed his enemies.  Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara; he was avenged at Rome; his glory still lives in the folk-songs of Venice.  These three elements are inseparable from his immortal memory.  To represent them in music, we first called up his august spirit as he still haunts the waters of Venice.  Then we beheld his proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals of Ferrara where he had produced his master-works.  Finally we followed him to Rome, the eternal city, that offered him the crown and glorified in him the martyr and the poet.

“Lamento e Trionfo:  Such are the opposite poles of the destiny of poets, of whom it has been justly said that if their lives are sometimes burdened with a curse, a blessing is never wanting over their grave.  For the sake not merely of authority, but the distinction of historical truth, we put our idea into realistic form in taking for the theme of our musical poem the motive with which we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing over the waters the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet: 

    “’Canto l’armi pietose e’l Capitano
    Che’l gran Sepolcro libero di Christo!’

“The motive is in itself plaintive; it has a sustained sigh, a monotone of grief.  But the gondoliers give it a special quality by prolonging certain tones—­as when distant rays of brilliant light are reflected on the waves.  This song had deeply impressed us long ago.  It was impossible to treat of Tasso without taking, as it were, as text for our thoughts, this homage rendered by the nation to the genius whose love and loyalty were ill merited by the court of Ferrara.  The Venetian melody breathes so sharp a melancholy, such hopeless sadness, that it suffices in itself to reveal the secret of Tasso’s grief.  It lent itself, like the poet’s imagination, to the world’s brilliant illusions, to the smooth and false coquetry of those smiles that brought the dreadful catastrophe in their train, for