{"product_id":"torquato-tasso","title":"Torquato Tasso: The first separate edition","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTorquato Tasso.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Leipzig, G. J. Göschen, 1790.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTitle-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).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublished in the same year as \u003cem\u003eFaust. Ein Fragment\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eTorquato Tasso\u003c\/em\u003e stands at another threshold in Goethe's development. If \u003cem\u003eWerther\u003c\/em\u003e made him famous and the Italian journey changed how he saw the world, \u003cem\u003eTasso\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eWerther\u003c\/em\u003e,\" confirming Ampère's reading that, after the strains of his first decade at the Weimar court, he had taken up \u003cem\u003eTasso\u003c\/em\u003e in Italy to free himself from those recollections [Eckermann, 3 May 1827].\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe bourgeois world of \u003cem\u003eWerther\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eSturm und Drang\u003c\/em\u003e to the restraint of Weimar Classicism. Where \u003cem\u003eWerther\u003c\/em\u003e is rooted in German bourgeois life and \u003cem\u003eGötz\u003c\/em\u003e in the German past, \u003cem\u003eTasso\u003c\/em\u003e takes an Italian poet at an Italian court.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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, \u003cem\u003eThe Classical Centre\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePROVENANCE\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Heribert Tenschert Collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eREFERENCES\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHagen 200; Goedeke IV\/3, 291; Kippenberg I, 365; Hirzel A 162; Speck 1617; Brieger 718; Wilpert\/Gühring 46.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGoethe, \u003cem\u003eItalienische Reise\u003c\/em\u003e; J. P. Eckermann, \u003cem\u003eGespräche mit Goethe\u003c\/em\u003e, 3 and 6 May 1827; T. J. Reed, \u003cem\u003eThe Classical Centre\u003c\/em\u003e(Oxford, 1980), pp. 165 ff.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46940259319996,"sku":null,"price":14500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0736\/1285\/3436\/files\/Tasso_1790_Maroquin-1.png?v=1781142673","url":"https:\/\/atelierzweig.com\/products\/torquato-tasso","provider":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}