Despite the ostensibly heavy-handed title and overtly lachrymose music, this piece (or at least its titular conceit) is but a musical pun: a play on words derived from the phonetic similarity between the phrase “tear-laden soul” and ti–le–sol (pronounced “tee-lay-soul”), the solfège of the scale degrees which comprise this piece’s central motif. To say, moreover, that this piece is suffused, nay, laden with this motif, would be a gross understatement. Indeed, the music cannot seem to escape it.

There exists, nevertheless, a certain validity to the title’s implications concerning the emotional content of the music, for the descending shapes of the piece’s melodic lines, and its incontrovertibly impassioned character, do both conspire to effect a rather saccharine, schmaltzy work of otherwise stark simplicity– not unlike the saline stuff of translucent tears.

Let it be known, however, that if at all the composer’s was a tear-laden soul when composing this piece, his was certainly not a tear-laden mind. After all, as is often the case, these such drops of the subconscious seldom originate anywhere but the most obscure and consciously-inaccessible lacrimators of the utmost abyssal inner self.