1. Background

2. Libretto and Liszt's delay

3. Roles

4. First edition

5. First recording and press response

6. Sources

7. Notes

Background

Liszt was motivated to write a large-scale opera at least partly in an attempt to be recognised as more than a travelling keyboard virtuoso.^[2] (His early one-act opera, Don Sanche, composed aged 13, flopped after four performances at the Paris Opéra, and could hardly qualify to raise his status.) Among the range of opera subjects he considered, he initially settled on an opera based on Byron's The Corsair, and even obtained in 1844 a libretto by Alexandre Dumas, but nothing came of this.^[3] Towards the end of 1845 he settled on the subject of Byron's Sardanapalus (1821). At this time Liszt was working at the court in Weimar, and very briefly considered a possible opportunity at the Hoftheater, Vienna, where the Kapellmeister, Gaetano Donizetti, was seriously ill (although he did not in fact die until 1848). A large-scale opera was important for Liszt's emerging status; specifically, it could have placed him in the running for Donizetti's influential post, as he wrote in an 1846 letter to the Comtesse d'Agoult.^[4] Yet he told her only a few months later that, given the conduct of the people involved, "that post will do me no good" and was no longer a consideration.^[5] In correspondence with his close associate the Princess Belgiojoso, Liszt planned to have the opera performed in Milan in 1846–47, later switching the planned venue to the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_am_Kärntnertor| Kärntnertor Theater] in Vienna (1847), and finally to Paris or London (1852).

Sardanapalus was, according to the writer Ctesias, the last king of Assyria. Some have identified him with Assurbanipal, but the Sardanapalus of Ctesias, "an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide" ^[6] is not an identifiable historical character. Ctesias's tale (the original is lost) was preserved by Diodorus Siculus, and it is on this account that Byron based his play.

Liszt had been present at the 1830 premiere of the oratorio The Death of Sardanapalus by Hector Berlioz, which featured an immolation scene, in preparation for which a "sacrifice of the innocents" is depicted in Eugène Delacroix's sensational 1828 painting of the subject (illustration). These influences probably led Liszt to a similarly sensational concept. With reference to the inferno that ends Byron's play, he tells Belgiojoso that his finale will aim to set the entire audience alight.^[7] By 1849, when he at last began to write the music, he conceived the idea of further altering the libretto by adding an orgy scene, perhaps as in Delacroix, but this was turned down by Belgiojoso.^[8]

Libretto and Liszt's delay

As musicologist David Trippett argued, Liszt's first librettist, Félicien Mallefille, submitted an initial libretto too late for Liszt to consider continuing his planned collaboration with the Frenchman. An unknown contact of Belgiojoso delivered the first act of a libretto, in Italian, in 1847, with the remainder following a year thereafter. However, by 1849 Liszt had still not written a note of the music.^[9] It appears Liszt composed the first act between 1849 and 1851.

Eventually Liszt wrote 110 pages of music (now in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar) and wrote to Richard Wagner that it would be ready for production on Paris or London in 1852. Liszt's assistant, Joachim Raff, notes in December 1851 that he would soon be asked to produce a provisional orchestration of the opera for Liszt, but this never took place. Shortly thereafter Liszt seems to have abandoned his work on the opera. The pianist Kenneth Hamilton suggests that his diffidence may have resulted from reading Wagner's essay Opera and Drama, by whose standards Sardanapalo could have appeared somewhat dated.^[10] Trippett has argued this was unlikely to have been a decisive factor, and suggested instead that Liszt's abandonment resulted from his concern over the libretto, and the fact that he never received a revised libretto for Acts 2 and 3, so could not set these to music.^[11]

Roles

First edition

In 2016, musicologist David Trippett discovered that the music and libretto are both decipherable and continuous, constituting the first act of Liszt's planned three-act opera.^{[13] [14] [15]} The resulting edition of Liszt's manuscript was published in 2019 in two editions: a critical edition for the Neue Liszt Ausgabe, and an orchestrated performing edition (Schott) that draws critically on all Liszt's indications and cues for orchestration. ^{[16] [17]} No music or libretto text is known to exist for Acts 2-3.

First recording and press response

Sardanapalo (2019). Joyce El-Khoury (Mirra), Airam Hernández (King Sardanapalo), Oleksandr Pushniak (Beleso) Weimar Staatskapelle, conducted by Kirill Karabits. [https://www.audite.de/en/product/CD/97764-mazeppa_sardanapalo.html Audite CD 97764]. This recording was released on 8 February 2019 and arose from the world premiere performance in Weimar, 19-20 August 2018. Upon its release the recording received significant [https://www.sardanapalo.org/press critical acclaim], and became the best-selling classical CD (across all platforms) in the UK Official Charts.

For The Guardian is was "a lost opera of glittering scope,"^[20] The Sunday Times (Album of the week) spoke of "rip-roaring stuff, characteristic of the dramatic orchestral narratives of the composer’s neglected tone poems,"^[21] and Opera Now (Critics Choice) declared it "lush and Romantic to a fault, with long-spun melodies, an innate sense of dramatic thrust and some thrilling choral work. ... Liszt does forge his own voice."^[22]

Sources

• Kenneth Hamilton, "Not with a bang but a whimper: The death of Liszt's 'Sardanapale' ", Cambridge Opera Journal 8/1 (1996), 45-58
• Kenneth Hamilton, "Elective affinities: Wagner and Liszt", in Richard Wagner and his World, ed. Thomas S. Grey, Princeton (2009), 27-64
• Daniel Ollivier, Correspondence de Liszt et de la Comtesse d'Agoult, Paris, 1933-4.
• David Trippett, "[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690403.2018.1507120 An Uncrossable Rubicon: Liszt's Sardanapalo Revisited,]" Journal of the Royal Music Association 143 (2018), 361-432.

Notes

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• Clive Moyo-Modise