Torquato Tasso. Leipzig, G. J. Göschen, 1790.

Title-page and 222 pp. Small octavo (153 × 96 mm). Contemporary red morocco with multiple gilt fillet and floral border frames to both boards, the gilt compartmented spine with vase and lyre ornaments (period luxury binding, immaculately preserved).

Published in the same year as Faust. Ein Fragment, Torquato Tasso stands at another threshold in Goethe's development. If Werther made him famous and the Italian journey changed how he saw the world, Tasso is the work in which those experiences were subjected to a new discipline, among the earliest and most complete expressions of the classical ideal that would define the Weimar years. Goethe endorsed Ampère's description of the play as an "elevated Werther," confirming Ampère's reading that, after the strains of his first decade at the Weimar court, he had taken up Tasso in Italy to free himself from those recollections [Eckermann, 3 May 1827].

The bourgeois world of Werther gives way to the refined air of the ducal court at Ferrara, where rank, etiquette and patronage become inseparable from the drama. Tasso is destroyed neither by war nor fate but within an ordered, cultivated society, as the relationship between poetic sensibility and the structures meant to contain it grows ever more fragile. The work occupied Goethe for almost a decade, begun in Weimar in 1780, recast in verse and completed in 1789, its history mirroring the transformation from the turbulence of Sturm und Drang to the restraint of Weimar Classicism. Where Werther is rooted in German bourgeois life and Götz in the German past, Tasso takes an Italian poet at an Italian court.

The drama carries an unusually personal charge, and Goethe owned it as his own. He set the poet Tasso against the courtier Antonio as "a prosaic contrast," observed that its court life and love affairs "were at Weimar as they were in Ferrara," and called the play "bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh" [Eckermann, 6 May 1827]. T. J. Reed has called it Goethe's most self-revealing classical drama [Reed, The Classical Centre, pp. 165 ff.]. The present copy is immaculate, one of the most beautiful known of this first edition; a copy of so famous a play in so elaborate a contemporary luxury binding is one we have never before encountered.

PROVENANCE

The Heribert Tenschert Collection.

REFERENCES

Hagen 200; Goedeke IV/3, 291; Kippenberg I, 365; Hirzel A 162; Speck 1617; Brieger 718; Wilpert/Gühring 46.

Goethe, Italienische Reise; J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 3 and 6 May 1827; T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre(Oxford, 1980), pp. 165 ff.