Ariosto and Torquato Tasso

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  • aeolium
    Full Member
    • Nov 2010
    • 3992

    Ariosto and Torquato Tasso

    Having recently been listening to two operas separated in composition by more than a century but linked by a common theme - Handel's Rinaldo and Rossini's Armida - I wanted to explore further the sources for these two quite different operas. It seems that the poem La Gerusalemme Liberata, or Jerusalem Delivered, by the C16 Italian poet Torquato Tasso was the main influence, though this poem itself must also have been influenced by the earlier poem Orlando Furioso by another Italian Ariosto, and both plots seem to revolve around conflict between Christians and Saracens in Carolingian times, though with many additional sub-plots involving love stories and fantastical elements. What surprised me was just how phenomenally influential these stories have been, particularly in musical settings but also on literature and art. The wiki entry for La Gerusalemme Liberata lists compositions by over 40 separate composers which used the poem in some way for operatic or other musical settings, composers including Monteverdi, Lully, Handel, Vivaldi, Graun, Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, Brahms, Dvorak and, despite a C20 lull, Judith Weir in 2005. If one adds in the compositions influenced by Ariosto's work, then there will be many more. And then writers as various as Spenser, Lope de Vega, Mandelstam and Borges have been influenced by Ariosto. But as a single literary influence on music, the Roland legend as told through these stories seems to have been perhaps greater than any other, including the legends of Troy, Faust and the Grail/Arthurian knights - or am I overstating the case here?

    What are the reasons for the enduring power of these stories? They seem to combine the themes of heroic quest, divine calling, romantic entanglements embellished with a quality of sheer fantasy. With their multiple plots within plots they are a gift for melodramatic settings by librettists. And the period of their greatest influence, from the late C17 to the late C18, coincides with a continuing threat to Central and Eastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire (whose armies came to the gates of Vienna in 1683 and again in 1783) so that the conflict central to the plot was topical. The current and long-standing uneasy relationship between the West and the Middle East must now make staging of the Ariosto/Tasso-inspired operas a delicate business. Weir's recent opera Armida emphasizes the abandonment of war and the conquest of love and peace (and gardening!)

    To my shame I have not read either of these very influential poems, though I aim to correct that by reading Edward Fairfax's 1600 translation of the Tasso poem. It seems as though despite Cervantes' stinging mockery of these and other similarly fantastic stories, he did not succeed in consigning them to artistic oblivion.
  • vinteuil
    Full Member
    • Nov 2010
    • 12986

    #2
    Originally posted by aeolium View Post

    To my shame I have not read either of these very influential poems, though I aim to correct that by reading Edward Fairfax's 1600 translation of the Tasso poem.
    ... as da yoof say, 'Respect!'

    Like you I have slowly discovered how extraordinarily influential these Ariosto and Tasso texts have been.
    To my shame - altho' I have both on the shelves - "somehow I have never got round to reading them" - tho' I have dipped in from time to time.

    Hence my respect for your plan to read the Fairfax Tasso...

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    • vinteuil
      Full Member
      • Nov 2010
      • 12986

      #3
      ... I am trying to recall the Alan Coren anecdote - he starting a doctorate on Spenser, and reading a paper to his supervisor, with extensive quotes from Ariosto, noting the supervisor's increasing blank look, asked : "But you have read Ariosto?" - to which, slowly : "Coren, no. Never got round to it. And now it's too late. It's like playing pool. A time comes when you just play with the balls left on the table..."

      But I so wish I could recall the anecdote more precisely - because it's one that comes to mind more and more often at my age...

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