But such formal statement as this is vague and meaningless without the practical application which Liszt gave it. The second and in many respects the noblest of Liszt’s symphonic poems is the ‘Tasso, Lament and Triumph,’ composed in 1849 to accompany a festival performance of Goethe’s play at Weimar on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The subject caught hold of Liszt’s romantic imagination. He confesses, like the good romanticist that he is, that Byron’s treatment of the character appealed to him more than Goethe’s. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says in his preface to the work, ‘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 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.’ A few lines further Liszt says: ‘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 hero the melody to which we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing over the waters the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet.’ The theme is one of the finest in the whole Liszt catalogue. We need hardly go to the length of saying that its origin was a fiction on the part of the composer, but doubtless he changed it generously to suit his musical needs. Yet his evident delight in its pretended origin is typical of the man and the time; romanticism had a sentimental veneration for ‘the people,’ especially the people of the Middle Ages, and a Venetian gondolier would naturally be the object of a shower of quite undeserved sentimental poetry. The whole story, and the atmosphere which surrounded it, was meat for Liszt’s imagination. [Illustration: Music score] 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: