Sardanapale

Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus, which contributed to Liszt's treatment of the story in his opera

This well-known 1840 painting of Liszt at the piano, surrounded by musical contemporaries, by the artist Josef Danhauser, features on the rear wall a portrait of Lord Byron, author of Sardanapalus

Sardanapale (Italian for Sardanapalus) is an unfinished opera by Franz Liszt based loosely on the 1821 verse play Sardanapalus by Lord Byron.

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. (His early one-act opera, Don Sanche, could hardly qualify to raise his status.) Originally he intended to write an opera based on Byron's The Corsair, and even obtained in 1844 a libretto by Alexandre Dumas père. Eventually in 1845 he settled on the subject of Sardanapalus. At this time Liszt was working at the court in Weimar, but may have had his eyes on opportunities 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 could have placed Liszt in the running for Donizetti's influential post, as he wrote in an 1846 letter to the Comtesse d'Agoult. In correspondence with his close associate the Princess Belgiojoso, Liszt planned to have the opera performed in Milan in 1846-7.

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" 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 as shown in Eugène Delacroix's sensational 1828 painting of the subject (illustration). These influences probably led Liszt to a similarly sensational concept. 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 as in Delacroix, but this was turned down by Belgiojoso.

Liszt's dilatoriness

An initial libretto, by Jean Pierre Mallefille, was both late and unacceptable. An unknown friend of Belgiojoso delivered a libretto, in Italian, in 1847, and Liszt was then confident of completing the work in 1848. However, by 1849 he had still not written a note of music.

Eventually Liszt wrote 111 pages of score, (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. Soon after this he seems to have abandoned his work on the opera. The musicologist Kenneth Hamilton suggests that his diffidence may have been induced by reading Wagner's essay Oper und Drama, by the standards of which Sardanapale would have appeared extremely dated.

Planned completion

The British musicologist David Trippett is planning a reconstruction of the opera.

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.