Franz Liszt spent nearly seven years on Sardanapalo, an Italian opera based on Lord Byron's Assyrian tragedy of 1821. Working intermittently, he abandoned a continuous draft in 1852. The surviving music, a score of 115 pages, constitutes the entirety of Act 1 (minus its final cadence): a unique mixture of Italianate pastiche and mid-century harmonic innovation.
Between 2016-19 the opera was brought to modern ears by David Trippett at the University of Cambridge. The manuscript was assumed to be fragmentary and difficult to read, its music irretrievable. But after a reevaluation, and a period of intensive study, a critical edition for the Neue Liszt Ausgabe (EMB) and a performance edition for Schott were both published in 2019.
Byron's Sardanapalus sees the end of an ancient line of Kings - where forbidden love leads to self-immolation. The opera’s plot for Act 1 concerns the psychological tension of Mirra, an Ionian slavegirl in love with her captor, Sardanapalo, whose kingdom is threatened by rebels. Amid their fiery relationship, she ultimately persuades the Assyrian monarch to fight to protect his realm (against his instincts for peace). Liszt’s unnamed librettist was an Italian poet and a close acquaintance of Princess Cristina Belgiojoso. The libretto survives as underlay in the N4 manuscript and minor details have been critically reconstructed by Marco Beghelli (with Francesca Vella and David Rosen), based on the metrical and rhyming scheme.
Drawing on Liszt’s indications in the manuscript, Trippett orchestrated the score according to the instrumental cues and orchestral textures Liszt specified for this purpose; he also drew on the scoring and instrumentation of the early symphonic poems, and the operatic scores on Liszt’s desk at the time. To close the Act he added just 19 bars using material drawn from earlier in the manuscript. Liszt’s intention had been for his assistant Joachim Raff to produce a provisional orchestration in 1852, but in the end this had to wait until 2018.
The world première took place in Weimar, under Kirill Karabits and the Staatskapelle Weimar on 19-20 August 2018 with singers Joyce El Khoury, Airam Hernández, and Oleksandr Pushniak.
Listen here to the full score, view a documentary exploring the research process (with keyboard excerpts), and read the full research story to discover more.