Torquato Tasso - Tasso and Other Artists

Tasso and Other Artists

• Tasso's lyric poetry may have had some influence in late-Renaissance France on Desportes and Ronsard (whom Tasso met in Paris). It almost certainly influenced a number of English Elizabethans, including Sir Philip Sidney, Abraham Fraunce, and Samuel Daniel.
• Claudio Monteverdi composed Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda upon the text of Gerusalemme Liberata, canto XII. He also composed music over some of Tasso's Rime, particularly madrigals.
• Giaches de Wert and Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa put into music many texts from Tasso's Rime and Gerusalemme.
• The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a play Torquato Tasso in 1790, which explores the struggles of the artist. He also composed a cantata text, "Rinaldo", inspired by Canto Sixteen of "Jerusalem Delivered," which was later set to music by Johannes Brahms.
• Giacomo Leopardi wrote Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo Genio familiare (Operette morali, 1824), a prose about the long stay in St. Anna. The main theme is a comparison between pain and boredom, expressed in a dialogue between Tasso and a "Genius", or ghost, said to be visiting him in his loneliness.
• Among the numerous operas based on "Jerusalem Delivered" are works by Lully, Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Salieri, Cherubini, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Rossini, and Dvořák. There is even an experimental modern opera on the theme, by Judith Weir, transposing the scene into contemporary Iraq.
• Both Edmund Spenser and John Milton were greatly influenced by Tasso's work.
• Lord Byron's poem "The Lament of Tasso" narrates Tasso's spell in St. Anna's hospital.
• The Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti wrote an opera on the subject of Torquato Tasso (1833) and incorporated some of the poet's writing into the libretto.
• Franz Liszt composed a symphonic poem, Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo in commemoration of the centenary of Goethe's play. The sombre first half represents his anguish in the asylum, and the glorious second half charts the acknowledgement he and his poetry achieved after he departed from the hospital.
• Artists inspired by both "Jerusalem Delivered" and "Aminta" have been legion and include Tintoretto, the Carracci, Guercino, Pietro da Cortona, Domenichino, Cigoli, Van Dyck, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Tiepolo, Boucher, Fragonard, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Hayez, and Delacroix.