Ideale

Tosti set a text by Carmelo Errico, the poet who supplied him with several of his best-known songs, and published Ideale in 1882 — the years when he was moving between Rome and London and building the career as a fashionable singing teacher that would end with a British knighthood in 1908. The words address an ideal beloved who appeared once and vanished, and the setting withholds the climax until the final phrase, which rises to the top of the tenor's range on the word return.