Tasso's

Straight after the opening night of Glyndebourne's latest Handel staging – his 1711 London triumph, Rinaldo, based on Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata – I stormed home and wrote an outraged piece wondering how the director, Robert Carsen, could have treated the First Crusade, that most desperate of religious bloodbaths, as a schoolroom tiff between adolescents in blazers and Saracens sporting mini-gymslips under their full hijabs.

Cendrillon; Rinaldo – review 2011

Its source is Tasso's war epic Gerusalemme Liberata, but whereas most other composers were inspired by the great love affair across battle lines between Rinaldo and Armida, Vivaldi dramatises its messy aftermath, in which Armida heads for Egypt, where she uses all her sexual powers in an attempt to persuade the caliph and his generals to raise an army against Rinaldo's forces on her behalf.

Vivaldi: Armida al Campo d'Egitto 2010

Mannered, aristocratic and elegant, the poetry of Il pastor fido came to rival that of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata as a source of madrigal texts.

Archive 2009-06-01 Lu 2009

Wert's artistically productive and evidently close contacts with Tasso and Guarini date from this period; for example, Il sesto libro de madrigali, of 1577, contains a setting of Tasso's Tolse Barbara gentil which must have been composed shortly after the verse had been written and before it was published.

Archive 2009-06-01 Lu 2009

Tasso's descriptions also seem directly inspired by the artistic milieu around him.

News at Eleven: [Torquato] Tasso's poem practically begged Rus Bowden 2007

Spenser's sorceresses, enchanted islands, and wandering knights are borrowed from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, published in 1516, which was Tasso's source for the same material, and Milton, for his council of Satan and the fallen angels, drew on Tasso's fifth Canto, in which Beelzebub and the devils of Hell plan an attack on the Crusaders.

Liberating a Masterpiece Knox, Bernard 2001

A first taste of Tasso's great poem, completed in 1575, suggests that it is an exotic literary cocktail composed in Italian of equal portions of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Homer's Iliad, with a generous splash of Virgil's Aeneid and a soupçon of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Liberating a Masterpiece Knox, Bernard 2001

All over the country nothing was to be heard but the echoes of Tasso's praises.

Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood Hugh Macmillan

Tasso's mind was one that was peculiarly adapted to reflect all the special characteristics of the theme.

Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood Hugh Macmillan

The poetical gallantry of the day will account for all Tasso's lyrical effusions in praise of Leonora.

Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood Hugh Macmillan