Sardanapalo by Franz Liszt (review)

For more than fifty years, the New Edition of the Complete Works / Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, published by Editio Musica Budapest, has been the most authoritative source for Franz Liszt’s music. Yet despite releasing fifty-seven volumes to date, the New Edition of the Complete Works (New Liszt Edition [NLE]) has never ventured beyond series I and II (including supplemental volumes), which are devoted exclusively to solo piano music. General editors like Zoltán Gardonyi, István Szelényi, Adrienne Kaczmarczyk, and Imre Mezo˝ have treated the etudes, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Sonata in B Minor, and a huge swath of some of the nineteenth century’s most difficult piano music with reverence and care. But Liszt, who spent much of his professional life trying to dispel the notion that he was “ just” a pianist’s composer, might wonder about the NLE’s focus, given that his four-hand piano music, songs, symphonic poems, and a cappella choral music, and more, still await authoritative, modern critical editions.

Thus, the appearance of David Trippett’s edition as volume 2 of series IX, “Vocal works with orchestra or with several instruments,” marks a decisive and welcome step for the NLE. The work in question, Sardanapalo, seems an unlikely candidate for this honor: Liszt never finished the opera, despite actively developing it in the second half of the 1840s and writing music for it in the early 1850s; the archivist and Liszt biographer Peter Raabe dismissed its piecemeal state around 1911; and in 1996 the pianist and Liszt scholar, Kenneth Hamilton, deemed it a prime example of how “the amount of talk is often in inverse proportion to the action” (“Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Death of Liszt’s Sardanapale,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 1 [1996]: 45). Yet Trippett has demonstrated otherwise, and through Herculean efforts of archival research, source study, style analysis, and interdisciplinary collaboration has produced an edition that is highly readable, mostly playable, occasionally baffling, frequently intriguing, and altogether eminently rewarding.

Consistent with all volumes of the NLE, Trippett’s edition is organized into four large sections: preface, music, appendix, and critical report. The preface is devoted primarily to the work’s genesis. Trippett situates Sardanapalo among the many operatic projects that Liszt considered during the 1840s— projects which, when fulfilled, would prove his compositional worth to a European public that knew him almost exclusively as an exceptional pianist. Indeed, copious but unfocused references in his correspondence during this decade to Scott, Sand, Schiller, Goethe, and other writers attest to the importance and urgency that Liszt placed on scoring an operatic hit. He seems to have settled on Byron’s Corsaire around 1843, but problems with the libretto caused him to abandon the project by 1844. By late 1845, he had settled on another work by Byron, the five-act Sardanapalus of 1821, and enlisted the help of Princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, known today among Lisztians as host for the famous duel between Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg that took place in her salon on 31 March 1837.

Liszt had had a decent artistic relationship with Marie d’Agoult in the 1830s, producing the Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, and he would again work with another woman of letters, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, in the 1850s on various pieces of writing, including Berlioz and His “Harold” Symphony, which laid out his influential ideas on program music. In partnering with Belgiojoso, Liszt gained a discerning, well-connected collaborator who could have realistically helped fulfill Liszt’s goal of producing a standout Italian opera. Unfortunately, their arrangement was ill-conceived and its execution clumsy. She was to commission a libretto from an unnamed poet. Only after revising and correcting said libretto would she send it to Liszt. As Trippett...