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(P. Kennicott)
The legacy of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, once considered almost a peer of Dante, is hiding in plain sight.
Although he is no more than a footnote today, he was once wildly popular, quoted by philosophers, emulated by poets, and a source of inspiration to painters and composers.
Even his sad and tormented life was an obsession for the romantics, inspiring a play by Goethe, a poem by Byron, a painting by Delacroix, a symphonic study by Liszt, and an opera by Donizetti.
The characters who romped across the pages of Tasso's 1575 masterpiece, the epic poem "Gerusalemme Liberata," ("Jerusalem Delivered"), Rinaldo and Armida, live and breathe still, in paintings by Nicola Poussin and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Vicenza) who captured them redolent with sexuality and pink-hued youth.
RINALDO OPERISTICO
And from the earliest days of opera in the 17th century, composers have turned to Tasso's intertwined tales of romance and heroism.
Giorgio Handel (cantata, 1711, "Rinaldo"), Haydn, Rossini, even Dvorak wrote operas based on Tasso's amorous young things: the knight Rinaldo and her paramour Armida.
If you've been to a museum, or to a concert of Italian madrigals, you know them well, even if you've never heard of the poet whose former fame is as astonishing as his current oblivion.
On Saturday, the Washington area's best period instruments group, Opera Lafayette, gave the first musical installment of something it calls "The Rinaldo Project," a look at two immensely influential and beautiful operas based on the sorceress who is perhaps Tasso's most enduring character.
Its performance of "Armide," the last and greatest opera by the 17th-century French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, was heard at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, followed, in April, by a full staging of Christoph Willibald Gluck's 18th-century setting of the same libretto.
Although focused on how two very different composers responded to the same text, "The Rinaldo Project" also demonstrates the enduring appeal of Tasso's story line.
It was a Christian answer to the epic poets of the ancient world, Homer and Virgil.
The poem, "La Gerusalemme Liberata", was filled not only with fantasy and romantic digressions but a stark contest between love (often for exotic "infidel" women) and duty (the crusader's moral obligation to capture the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Muslims).
Armida, "to whom the Orient granted beauty's prize," is a temptress and a witch, who bedevils Rinaldo's project.
Armida leads off a passel of them on a fool's errand, and then imprisons them in her castle, built on the ruins of Sodom, but "lovely inside in every part."
It is Armida's romance with Rinaldo that most fired the imaginations of Tasso's followers.
Rinaldo is the epic's central hero, the progenitor of the royal Duca di Ferrara who was Tasso's patron.
While Armida's charms are merely weapons against the other crusaders, Armida herself falls in love with Rinaldo and whisks him away to a bewitched pleasure garden where she
"sipped sweet kisses from his eye, and sucked them from his lips."
In what was the poem's most famous scene, and one of the most enchanting scenes in all of literature, Rinaldo is confronted with his dereliction of duty by two crusader comrades who come to rescue him from Armida's clutches and bring him back to battle.
Tiepolo painted the scene in the 1740s, hewing closely to the details of Tasso's poem.
Armida exposes one breast and points a plump, pink leg at the viewer, while Rinaldo lies in her lap -- a soldier thoroughly emasculated by love.
The Christian knights look on from behind a low wall, horrified, and perhaps jealous too, as great swaths of fabric billow around the voluptuous couple.
Filippo Quinault, who wrote the libretto that is the focus of Opera Lafayette's "Rinaldo Project," devoted the entire last act of the opera to this pivotal moment, ending with Armida, alone onstage, lamenting the loss of her beloved.
In Tasso's original, Rinaldo goes back to war, Gerusalemme is captured and poor Armida submits to Christian guidance.
In opera, this would be anticlimactic.
Far better to end with an enraged woman, and Quinault's stage directions:
"Demons destroy the enchanted Palace. Exit Armida on a flying chariot."
Tasso's poem practically begged other artists to borrow and steal.
Even Milton filched a scene (a conclave of devils in Hell).
Tasso's descriptions also seem directly inspired by the artistic milieu around him.
"And now he sees a woman's face arise / and now her breasts and nipples, and below / where modest eyes would be ashamed to go. / So would a goddess or a nymph arise / from the stage in the theater at night."
It's hard not to assume he was thinking of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," from a century earlier, in which a pagan goddess also emerges from the water, her hair casually covering the parts "where modest eyes would be ashamed to go."
When Tasso wants to emphasize the dramatic impact of a particular speech or confrontation, he habitually makes reference to the theater:
"The castle shone like a proud theater / when the pomp of evening decks the brilliant scene."
Or vocal music.
As Rinaldo flees Armida's embrace, she prepares a lament, a rhetorical and dramatic torch song to win him back.
Tasso makes it sound operatic:
"As cunning singers, just before they free / their voices into high and brilliant song, / prepare the listener's soul for harmony / with sweet notes sotto voce, low and long, / so in the bitterness of sorrow she / did not forget the tricks and arts of wrong."
Tasso lived in a great age of theater, music and painting, but there's more going on here than just borrowing ideas from the other arts to give his poem pizazz.
He's equating the music that sopranos sing ("high and brilliant song") with the dangerous and possibly satanic qualities of very sexy women.
In Armida, as limned by Tasso, we have a vehicle for everything that will make opera an addictive art form for the next four centuries: virtuosity, display, theatrical confrontation, music as a form of madness, and smoldering, intoxicating sexuality.
Armida, it seems, was the prototype of Maria Callas, and Tasso even anticipates the structure of the bel canto music that made Callas famous.
First, lyrical notes "low and long," then roulades of musical fantasy, "high and brilliant."
No surprise, Callas was a great Armida -- in the title role of Rossini's opera in the early 1950s.
As you trace the history of Tasso's poem into the 19th century, however, you sense the beginning of its decline.
Years after Rossini composed his 1817 "Armida," he wrote to a librettist warning,
"If I should counsel you, it would be to return with the limits of the natural rather than go farther into the world of wild fancies and diablerie."
Eventually, more and more critics, like Rossini, would be repelled by Tasso's fantastical excesses.
Others, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, would be critical of his moralism.
In his "Defense of Poetry," Shelley lumped Tasso with Euripides and Spenser, great but lesser poets, whose poetry was diminished by their moralizing.
In a sense, poor Tasso can't win.
He is too imaginative and too serious at the same time.
As the poem began to fade, however, Tasso himself became a potent subject.
He suffered from mental instability throughout his career, obsessing over his poems.
It was a favorite subject for the romantics -- the artist, a victim of his own prolific imagination, hounded into insanity.
Montaigne, the sober, 16th-century philosopher, apparently met Tasso, if we are to take a fascinating passage from one of his essays at face value.
"Countless minds have been ruined by their very power and suppleness," wrote Montaigne.
"I felt even more vexation than compassion to see him in Ferrara in so piteous a state, surviving himself, not recognizing himself or his works, which, without his knowledge and yet before his eyes, have been brought out uncorrected and shapeless." There's a heady mix, here, of two things the romantics would find irresistible: A sense of victimization, and a false connection between genius and madness.
And so we have Byron lamenting Tasso's "Long years of outrage, calumny and wrong; / imputed madness, prison'd solitude."
And Delacroix's haunting 1839 painting of "Tasso in the Madhouse," which shows the poet -- once a handsome and accomplished young man -- disheveled with his shirt open to the navel, the poet as greaseball with unfocused eyes.
He is isolated and miserable in his cell, while gawking women spy on him from a barred window, rather as the crusader knights once spied on Rinaldo and Armida.
Franz Liszt was inspired by the Byron poem and perhaps by Goethe's play ("Torquato Tasso") as well, when he wrote a tone poem based on Tasso.
And it's telling that Tasso's power to enchant was still so strong that Liszt made a pilgrimage, in 1885, to the monastery where Tasso died.
The impression on Liszt, who was not the self-pitying kind, was such that he identified with Tasso and lamented to a friend, "The time will indeed come when my works will be appreciated. For me, however, it will be too late."
Perhaps only Goethe really managed to capture the true tragedy of Tasso's illness.
His 1790 play is sadly little known in English, yet is one of the most sensitive and heartbreaking depictions of mental illness to emerge from an era that was only just beginning to practice compassion for the mentally ill. It transpires on a single day, the day that Tasso hands over his finished poem to his patron. Tasso is thin-skinned and paranoid, impetuous in love and friendship and just as impetuous when he perceives any kind of slight. He knows he's losing it, he knows he is driving away his friends; they know he's ill and struggle to find a way to soothe him. But Tasso's illness inexorably separates him from his allies, friends and fans. It's almost as if Goethe wanted to undo the damage of an earlier work, "The Sorrows of Young Werther," in which a lovesick young man blows his brains out, inspiring a horrific fetish for suicide among the more addlebrained adolescents of Europe.
Still, Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata" would continue to inspire composers sporadically.
A scene in Wagner's "Parsifal," set in a magical garden in which a demonic but beautiful witch tries to seduce the title character, is almost certainly a cheap borrowing from Tasso.
And as late as 1903, Dvorak turned to the Armida story, perhaps inspired by the success of his earlier opera "Rusalka," which dealt in water nymphs and other Tasso-like enchantments.
Today, alas, it's not a poem you want to be seen reading in the lobby of the United Nations, or at a cafe in Cairo or Damascus.
The poem is relentless about the moral necessity of wresting Jerusalem from the infidels.
So Christian is its worldview that Islam can only be understood as sorcery, or sick magic.
Tasso hoped to inspire a Europe fractured by the Reformation to unite for yet more bloody mayhem in the Middle East.
The crusader era may have been a century and a half in the past, but the dream died hard.
As late as the early 1600s, when Tasso's "Gerusalemme liberata" was taking Europe by storm, a couple of English hucksters, Robert and Anthony Sherley, tried to whip up interest in a new crusade, in part by enlisting the Persians (today's Iranians) against the Turks.
They failed, but impolitic politicians still reach for the word -- crusade -- almost reflexively when selling wars and revenge.
And so perhaps it's best that Tasso's epic survives as it does, fractured into an amorous plot, denuded of political and historical baggage, and tarted up for the enjoyment of opera audiences.
The poem remains a gripping tale, especially in a 2000 English translation by Anthony Esolen (the translation used here).
It's Tasso words that one hears in one of the most exciting new recordings of Monteverdi to emerge in years, "Combattimento," an album recorded by the brilliant young conductor Emmanuelle Haim with tenor Rolando Villazón.
And just two years ago the prominent Scottish composer Judith Weir debuted her "Armida" in which a high-powered journalist (Armida) encounters a soldier (Rinaldo) in a country that may well be Iraq.
It's unlikely that the original poem will ever have real currency again, but given how deeply it is embedded in our musical and artistic culture, it's best to say that while Tasso is forgotten, he will never be gone.
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