The most famous 19th-century pianist and composer known for his legendary keyboard works, knuckle-busting transcendental etudes, moody sonatas, and charismatic Hungarian Rhapsodies: Franz Liszt… wrote an Italian opera? Yes, and it’s coming very soon to Budapest!
It’s thanks to a British musicologist’s years of detective work within the Goethe & Schiller Archives in Weimar, Germany. There, David Trippett found a faded manuscript of 115 pages, unfinished and abandoned in 1852, but notated with enough information to figure out it was Liszt’s first and only attempt to write an opera. From that point on, Trippett made it one of his career challenges to resurrect this unknown score.
At the University of Cambridge, where Trippett is a Music Faculty professor, he and Italian libretto experts were able to assemble it enough to bring it to modern ears on the campus from 2016-2019. It was given its first official world premiere in Weimar with the Staatskapelle Weimar in 2018. Now, it’s coming to Budapest.
The one-act opera, “Sardanapalo,” based on Lord Byron’s Assyrian tragedy from 1821, will be performed at Müpa Budapest on October 22, as the grand finale of the 2023 Liszt Festival. The opera is set in the Assyrian Kingdom, at a time when forbidden love would lead to self-immolation. Mirra, an Ionian slave girl, falls in love with her captor, Sardanapalo, a monarch whose kingdom is threatened by rebels. The drama mounts when Mirra is able to persuade him to fight to save his realm.
The opera has three lead singers for whom many lovely and passionate arias offer an exciting taste of both the bel canto era and mid-century innovative European compositional styles. Since Liszt didn’t write an ending, Trippett drew upon the composer’s written specifications and orchestrated the score for orchestra, chorus and soloists, adding 19 bars to close the Act by using material from earlier in the original manuscript.
The performers in the Budapest concert are soprano Joyce El-Khoury as Mirra, tenor Airam Hernández as Sardanapolo, and baritone Oleksandr Pushniak as Beleso, a priest. The Staatskapelle Weimar, with the women of the Hungarian State Chorus (led by Csaba Somos) will be conducted by Kirill Karabits.
The Weimar performance, a broadcast clip of it on BBC 4, and a 2019 CD release of “Sardanapalo” were all greeted with many glowing reviews in the press (“white hot” — New York Times; “startling lyric beauty” –Bachtrack; “a brilliant musical achievement” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). Detailed information and a trailer are available on here.
This unusual, not-to-be-missed concert, not only marks the end of the Liszt Festival, but will be an important moment for not only Trippett, the musical artists, and for Müpa who had originally scheduled for the time when the covid lockdowns forced its cancellation. This Hungarian premiere of the newly unearthed and lovingly assembled “Sardanapalo” is a tribute to all involved, including Franz Liszt.