The Wagner factor

We might start at the end: with Wagner. After conducting Tannhäuser on the occasion of the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna's birthday on 16 February 1849, Liszt first entertained the idea of a mutually supportive friendship with Wagner, writing: ‘Once and for all, number me in future among your most zealous and devoted admirers; near or far, count on me and make use of me.’Footnote ²⁸ Wagner did not hesitate, of course, and history records an asymmetrical relationship. For at least a few months, however, it appeared to be more reciprocal, even symbiotic, in the sharing of aspirations; Wagner's support and encouragement of Liszt's compositional ambition during this time is a matter of record.Footnote ²⁹ Less appreciated, perhaps, is the extent to which it was interwoven with his music for Sardanapalo.

In his analysis of the reasons for Liszt's abandonment of the opera, Kenneth Hamilton posited Wagner's role as decisive:Footnote ³⁰ ‘The spectre of Wagner's pioneering dramas would hover balefully over anything [Liszt] did in Germany,’ he argues:

In such a view, Liszt recognizes the force of Wagner's aesthetic direction in opera and steps aside for the greater artist, rechannelling his creative energies into symphonic poetry, like electricity discharging itself along a more accommodating conductor. In this reading, his explicit statement ‘I must abide by my resolution never to write a German opera’ (1851) becomes less a tactful sidestepping of Wagner's suggestion that he set Wagner's cast-off libretto for Wieland der Schmied and more ‘a strong reluctance to compete directly on Wagner's turf’.Footnote ³² This is undoubtedly plausible (as is James's suggestion that, when faced with Wagner's knotty alliterative prose, Liszt viewed a familiar Italian genre as the easier option).Footnote ³³ However, with the music now at hand and the greater overview afforded by newly available correspondence, it is possible to draw slightly different conclusions. In short, while Wagner's role is undoubtedly present, it now appears less influential in Liszt's decision to abandon his opera.Footnote ³⁴

‘Creative power in music’, Wagner tells Liszt encouragingly in 1849, ‘appears to me like a bell, which the larger it is, the less able to give forth its full tone, unless an adequate power has set it in motion. This power is internal.’Footnote ³⁵ The letter arrived six months after Liszt's first attempt to draft the music for his long-planned opera. With gently goading metonymy it goes on to allude to Liszt's Goethe-Festalbum (1849), comprising discrete incidental and choral works related to Faust, three years after Liszt had first aspired to compose an opera entitled Marguerite:Footnote ³⁶

Coming from a new confidant whose Tannhäuser had fired Liszt's imagination in two piano transcriptions and an extended, propagandistic essay, this message tapped unwittingly into Liszt's long-standing ambition. Liszt was happy to divulge his plans. Two weeks later, he duly replied that Sardanapalo would soon be completely finished (see above, note 17) – a sentiment reiterated to various interlocutors.Footnote ³⁸ Two years later, however, the opera remained incomplete and Wagner raised the topic again, this time firmly suggesting that Liszt change direction:

Why the about-turn? During the winter of 1850–1, Wagner famously penned his most sustained diatribe against Italian opera in Part 1 of Oper und Drama. Had Sardanapalo come to fruition it would have sat awkwardly with Wagner's claim that Italian opera had died with Rossini (its ‘murderer’), that Italianate melody was a ‘plastic’ crime in music and that the whim of its overpaid singers rendered claims for a seriousness of dramatic purpose impossible. Wagner's subsequent words to Liszt, quoted above, suggest a direct correlation, as Hamilton argued.

But Liszt had no means of reading the anti-Italian rhetoric of Part 1 of Oper und Drama before (at the earliest) the end of November 1851, when the book was finally published by J. J. Weber, and his opera project continued thereafter.Footnote ⁴⁰ The three serialized excerpts to which he did have access in March and May – those that Wagner published in the Deutsche Monatsschrift – came from Part 2 (on poetry/drama), not Part 1 (on music/opera).Footnote ⁴¹ Wagner chose not to send him a personal copy of the full book, preferring instead to imply (misleadingly) on 14 December 1851 that it had ‘long been published, as you probably know’.Footnote ⁴² Instead he prompts Liszt to buy a copy of Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, whose preface summarizes some of the central claims in Oper und Drama, but – significantly for present purposes – closes with an encomium to Liszt as his principal supporter and, in artistic matters, his ‘second self’: ‘ I wager the preface will interest you very much.’Footnote ⁴³ If there were a malign intent in Wagner's actions here (vis-à-vis his knowledge of Liszt's aspiration for Sardanapalo), it would seem to be only to shackle Liszt to Wagner's views in Eine Mittheilung by publicly declaring Liszt's allegiance. The flip side is that Wagner apparently took pains not to share the rawest anti-Italian sentiments from Oper und Drama.

It is likely that Liszt read Part 1 eventually, of course. Assuming that he did so, his verdict was sure but delayed: it emerges in published comments on Meyerbeer and Rossini in the 12 essays he published in 1854, which place him starkly at odds with Wagner's judgments. Rossini ‘bestowed literary value’ on the literary texts used in his operas, ‘many of which had never been given attention before. Like a son of the gods who plays with the stars, he played with art.’Footnote ⁴⁴ When confronted with a mind such as Shakespeare, Rossini

It is telling that slapping down Wagner's views was not incompatible with Liszt's own criticism of Italian opera (see below). In complementary fashion, Meyerbeer – ‘for almost 50 years […] the leader of the gradual development of opera in France and Germany’Footnote ⁴⁶ – effected ‘new requirements for opera texts’ where dramatic situations come to the fore, motivating a merger of so-called ‘declamatory and melodic styles’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Differences of temperament notwithstanding, Liszt's independence from Wagner's character assassinations is palpable here, a fact that reflects his secure status in firmly disagreeing with his younger colleague.Footnote ⁴⁸

Perhaps this should come as little surprise. Wagner himself wrote privately at the time of ‘a friend […] quite distant from me in many important aspects of life. […] In my mind he doesn't understand me, my conduct is perfectly distasteful to him.’Footnote ⁴⁹ And Liszt quietly dismisses Wagner's plea for a new originality of purpose in theatres (in Ein Theater in Zürich) as an amusing diversion ‘that has little to teach us’.Footnote ⁵⁰ After Brendel first aligned Liszt and Wagner in the final chapters of his Geschichte, their popular conflation would be mercilessly caricatured by Nietzsche as ‘the emergence of the actor in music: […] In a formula: Wagner and Liszt’.Footnote ⁵¹ In such a view, Liszt – shorn of individuality – becomes a second in command, a sideshow, a kind of historical sidekick to Wagner's aesthetic leadership.Footnote ⁵² The hierarchy within this perspective sees the idealist project of symphonic poetry emerge only after Wagner decreed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony a historic pivot to future art, a threshold beyond which no purely symphonic composition is possible. This contradiction accounts for the diplomatic tiptoeing in Wagner's open letter on the symphonic poems (1857), where, after indicating that mental representations of Orpheus or Prometheus could replace the march or dance as arbiters of ‘form’ (on which music's ability to communicate depends), he nevertheless unveils a certain scepticism: that one may ‘point to the difficulty of extracting an intelligible form for musical composition out of such exalted representations’ and that ‘while listening to the best of [instrumental programme music], even works of genius, it always happened that I would lose the musical thread so completely that no amount of exertion allowed me to hang on to it or take it up again’.Footnote ⁵³ If we unshackle ourselves from Nietzsche's caricature, the historiographic implications of Liszt's compositional work on Sardanapalo and his later essays on opera suggest a number of such underlying differences of opinion.

In 1988, Detlef Altenburg summarized Liszt's independence cogently in this respect:

The implications of this discrepancy arguably have wider ramifications than Altenburg first intimated. It explains why Liszt's essays on opera consistently emphasize drama, literature and symphonic narrative: Fidelio constitutes a ‘uniquely dramatic work’ and Egmont ‘a new path for art’ wherein ‘the great composer felt immediate enthusiasm for this great poet's work’;Footnote ⁵⁵ Weber's Euryanthe becomes a ‘wonderful divination of the future form of drama’;Footnote ⁵⁶ and the composer of Der fliegende Holländer constitutes ‘the founder of German opera, or of musical drama’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This subtly alternative genealogy reveals how the differences with Wagner extend beyond valuations of Rossini and Meyerbeer to the very manner in which drama and literature could serve as the axis on which modern opera was to pivot. Such stark differences remind us that, despite his effusive appreciation of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, Liszt was independently minded enough to avoid taking Wagner's comments too seriously at the time. For all these reasons, then, Wagner's words – private and public – are unlikely to have been a decisive factor in his decision to stop work on Sardanapalo.

Towards Sardanapalo

That decision nevertheless closed the door on an ambition that dated back to October 1841, when Liszt first harboured ideas of composing a French opera after Byron, initially Le corsaire then Manfred,Footnote ⁵⁸ and a setting of Dante's Divina commedia. At the time, Liszt's interest in pursuing these operatic subjects was bound explicitly to his desire to attain status as a European composer, as opposed to that of a keyboard virtuoso. Over and above the pain of Schumann's stinging verdict in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (that a bald disparity (Mißverhältnis) was noticeable between Liszt's developed piano playing and his far less developed compositional aptitude),Footnote ⁵⁹ Liszt eyed Rossini's success and supra-musical stature in central Europe with a certain envy, comparing his progress in advancing art with Napoleon's in advancing society.Footnote ⁶⁰ In his eyes, it seems, the spectacle, size, expense and public appeal of Franco-Italian opera ensured that this was the privileged route to such power, to realizing his own avowed ‘social mission’ through art, and to enter ‘the musical guild’, as he later put it.Footnote ⁶¹ Accordingly, at the apex of his so-called Glanzzeit, Liszt tells his close friend the refugee noblewoman and salonnière Cristina Belgiojoso of his secret desire to dovetail careers; he will abandon his identity as a touring virtuoso ‘within three years’, he declares. ‘I'll end my career in Vienna and in Pest, where I began it. But before then, during the winter of 1843, I want to première an opera in Venice (Le corsaire after Lord Byron).’Footnote ⁶² It did not remain secret for long. Marie d'Agoult reports the same sentiment a year later,Footnote ⁶³ and Liszt would variously restate this retirement plan – ‘to cross my dramatic Rubicon’ – in January 1843 and March 1845.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, both matters were delayed: it would take him until September 1847 to retire as a professional virtuoso, and problems with the initial libretto for Le corsaire led him to Alexandre Dumas; in February 1844 Liszt tells d'Agoult that Dumas's libretto is ‘amusing’ (drôle), but it vanishes from his correspondence thereafter.Footnote ⁶⁵ Of the other planned subjects, Manfred and the Divina commedia, Liszt's compositional work on the former indicated that there would be a steep learning curve: ‘I began composing [the chorus for] Manfred ’, he states in 1844, conceding that ‘it is much harder than I thought because there is a certain monotony, and it's difficult to change that’.Footnote ⁶⁶ (His dissatisfaction with a libretto – in this case by O. L. B. Wolff – would prove prognostic, as we shall see.) As late as January 1850, Raff 's unvarnished words confirm the point: ‘His intention is to spend 2–3 years preparing in every style for a career as a composer, and thereafter to appear on the scene in Paris.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Late in 1845, again in tandem with Belgiojoso, Liszt conceived of, and settled upon, an opera based on (Lord Byron's) tale of Sardanapalus,Footnote ⁶⁸ the last Assyrian king, whose historic downfall followed his aversion to bloodshed, his indulgence with women and in revelry, and his unwillingness to employ brute force in governing his subjects.Footnote ⁶⁹ The choice of subject is perhaps unsurprising, its imagery and narrative thick in the air as Liszt came of age: Byron gave it exponential currency when he published a five-act tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821), twinning the weakness of Sardanapalus's non-violent rule with his reckless love of the Ionian slave-girl Mirra. Written in blank verse and dedicated to Goethe, it united two titans of literary Romanticism for Liszt, who acquired the first French translation in 1827. While he comments little on Byron's actual verse, Liszt's copy of Byron's Oeuvres complètes contains underlinings and marginalia, including one pencil bracket in Act 4 of the Englishman's play.Footnote ⁷⁰ At this point in the narrative, the King is dazzled by the spectacle of his own tragedy: he seeks to justify to his wife his pursuit of a peaceable regime rather than that of a brutal conqueror, rueing the lack of respect it has inspired among his subjects.

Even as Liszt's pencil stroke pinpoints the crux of the King's tragedy – a self-delusion that all are innately good – it reveals little of his hermeneutics as a reader, confirming only that, as with Le corsaire, he read the play, pencil in hand.Footnote ⁷² Elsewhere, as is well known, Liszt quoted from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in two epigraphs within his Album d'un voyageur (1837–8), planned several other operas after Byron and visited Byron's house in Venice during 1839, expressing delight at a chance encounter with a gondolier who had transported Byron himself around the waterways 15 years earlier.Footnote ⁷³ A year later, after paying a similar visit to Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, Liszt declared an idealist affinity: ‘After you [d'Agoult] […] it is to him alone that I feel deeply attracted. I know not what burning, whimsical desire comes over me from time to time to meet him in a world in which we shall at last be strong and free.’Footnote ⁷⁴ It would endure: ‘Byronism eats away at me,’ he confessed again in 1844.Footnote ⁷⁵

Also inspired by Byron's tragedy, Eugène Delacroix's substantial oil La mort de Sardanapale (1827–8) was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1828. A controversial work, it was criticized both for its subject – ‘the name [of Sardanapalus] has become synonymous with all that is most ridiculous and vile about debauchery and cowardice’ – and for its non-neoclassical, starkly coloured form. It was likened to a ‘Persian carpet’ and a ‘kaleidoscope’ by some, and the Journal des débats dubbed it simply ‘an error of the painter’.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Figure 2 shows, Delacroix's painting depicts the actions of the Eastern monarch upon learning that his kingdom has been sacked: he witnesses the destruction of all that is dear to him – a bonfire of the vanities – including his concubines, slaves, pets and stud of horses; all in preparation for his famed, opiate-fuelled self-immolation, or, as Byron puts it, ‘a leap through flame into the future’ whose excruciating pain would serve as a historic act of defiance:

Figure 2.

Eugène Delacroix, La mort de Sardanapale (1827–8). Musée du Louvre / Wikimedia Commons.

Liszt knew the lines and the painting, calling Delacroix ‘the Rubens of the school of Romanticism’ and telling Belgiojoso that his operatic finale will ‘even aim to set the audience alight!’Footnote ⁷⁸ While Stendhal felt that Delacroix had captured the spirit of Byron's ‘satanism’ and Victor Hugo found the work ‘magnificent’, rueing only the absent ‘basket of flames’ underneath, the complexity of the composition bewildered the writer Auguste Jal: ‘[Delacroix] wanted to compose disorder, and he forgot that disorder itself has a logic.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Its reception, in short, became a topic au courant within Paris's intellectual debate between classiques and romantiques.

Still closer to Liszt's circle, Berlioz's cantata La dernière nuit de Sardanapale (1830, setting a text by Jean François Gail) famously received the Prix de Rome. Berlioz destroyed most of the music (for tenor and male chorus), but Liszt attended its second performance in Paris.Footnote ⁸⁰ Alongside several versions of the play for spoken theatre (including some with incidental music)Footnote ⁸¹ and Giovanni Galzerani's azione mimica from the 1830s (which Liszt could conceivably have encountered in Milan),Footnote ⁸² the tale would prove popular for operatic treatment, receiving at least six settings during the nineteenth century (see Table 1). Even Verdi considered a request to set a version of the story in 1843, but refused on the grounds that the libretto was too similar to Nabucco.Footnote ⁸³ Liszt knew Pietro Rotondi's libretto for the 1844 opera, having studied a marked-up copy from Belgiojoso (‘of which I take great care’),Footnote ⁸⁴ but there is no evidence that he took an interest in, or was aware of, subsequent settings.

From a different perspective, colonial plunder also stirred interest in the subject of ancient Assyria. Five years after Liszt set aside his work on the opera, the eminent French critic Augustin Thierry wrote to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein expressing regret that Liszt ‘has not yet given us his opera Sardanapalo, whose libretto – I have learned [from Belgiojoso] – is excellent’. He elaborates:

Thierry was speaking of the shedu or lamassu, a huge winged bull that guarded gateways (see Figure 3). Suffice it to say that the imagery and anti-heroic narrative of Sardanapalus permeated an array of artistic media during the nineteenth century. From October 1845 Liszt harboured fervent ambitions to enter this cultural arena. As the following chronology demonstrates, he would work on and off for seven years to do so.

Figure 3.

Assyrian shedu or lamassu, winged bulls who guard gateways, relocated from northern Iraq to museums in London and Paris during the 1850s. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Thierry Ollivier.

A reconstructed chronology

On the basis of newly available correspondence (published and unpublished), and building on Hamilton's pioneering work in establishing an initial version of the chronology, it now seems most likely that events unfolded as follows. Liszt had decided to collaborate with Belgiojoso on an opera based on Byron's Sardanapalus shortly before his letter of 16 December 1845. He initially planned to procure the scenario from the novelist and playwright Félicien Mallefille for Belgiojoso to oversee, perhaps to translate and versify. ‘Soon I will bring you the scenario of the three acts of Sardanapalo,’ he promised her in December 1845. ‘We will have plenty of time to talk, and barring unforeseen circumstances I may be very tempted to première it during the carnival season of 1846–7 in Milan.’Footnote ⁸⁶ And in January 1846: ‘I warmly thank you for agreeing to take care of Sardanapalo. […] What you say about [it] is profoundly intelligent; I hope we can achieve a very good première for the opera. I'll send you a Sardanapalique scenario by mid-February at the latest, on which I pray for your observations. Versification comes next.’Footnote ⁸⁷ This suggests that Mallefille's deadline was February 1846. By April, Liszt had received nothing, and wrote to Belgiojoso with reassurance:

Frustrated with the delay, Liszt was burning to proceed: ‘I am behind with my paperwork and absolutely itching to compose,’ he confides to d'Agoult. ‘There remains the theatre, it is true, e vedremo il nostro Sardanapalo [and we will see our Sardanapalo]!’Footnote ⁸⁹ A month later, he writes again to Belgiojoso (who had yet to receive the promised scenario) to reassure her a second time and confirm his ambitions for a Vienna première ‘next season’ (1847).Footnote ⁹⁰ He tells others of the planned première,Footnote ⁹¹ while assuring d'Agoult of his confidence at becoming ‘a unanimously nominated candidate for [Donizetti's soon-to-be-vacant] position’ as Kapellmeister at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, a prestigious post to which he was only initially attracted, but one that d'Agoult had urged him to ‘make every effort to obtain’.Footnote ⁹²

During the summer of 1846, with no sign of Mallefille's scenario, Liszt's patience snapped. A vitriolic letter screams that Gaetano Belloni, his secretary, had been received ‘like a dog in a skittle-alley’ when he broke the news that ‘I had to put my hopes for Sardanapalo on hold until the end of September [1846]’. This was the second time Mallefille had missed a deadline (‘At all costs, I am determined he will not make a fool of me a third time’), and Liszt was resolute: ‘To be frank, it is quite impossible for me to hang around kicking my heels any longer!’Footnote ⁹³ Fearing for the planned Vienna première, he evidently decided to explore Belgiojoso's (undocumented) suggestion that she procure a scenario from a second poet whom she never names. This poet's work was to be rapid: before 5 August, Liszt sent Belloni again to Paris ‘with orders to bring me back, dead or alive, a Poem (which would be suitable for me) in his pocket. […] All my travel plans are thus subordinated to the quarter of an hour which will bring this result that matters to me above all.’Footnote ⁹⁴ The work was completed with alacrity. On 25 September Liszt thanked Belgiojoso for a scenario ‘so excellent that I doubt greatly that there could be an Italian poet capable of composing such a good one, and that I suspect your Highness, in particular, has been busy working on it. Another reason that I am doubly grateful to you.’Footnote ⁹⁵ The new arrangement – in which a poet creates and Belgiojoso edits and corrects – meant that Liszt was heavily reliant on Belgiojoso, and trusted her literary acumen, content in the knowledge that an Italian libretto would emerge under her authority:

Towards the end of the year, Liszt evidently sent Belloni on a third trip to chivvy matters along and extract the versified libretto. A full libretto was not forthcoming, but on New Year's Day 1847 Liszt confirmed to a publisher: ‘Belloni pulled it off ! / The first act of my opera has arrived – I will attend to it quickly, but after all these unexpected delays there can be no talk of it before the coming spring.’Footnote ⁹⁷ This versified text was completed mere weeks after the three-act scenario; as we shall see, it is almost certainly the only versified text Liszt received that was to his satisfaction, and hence that he set in N4.

In the meantime, Liszt had written – new scenario in hand – to tell Mallefille the partnership was off, and complained wryly to a confidant about his procrastination:

Liszt's ironic inversion (‘our Shakespeare’) indicates the hope that had been thwarted, and the frustration that cut correspondingly deep; he confirmed it to d'Agoult (‘You were right to protect me from the great man of the rue Tabazan’)Footnote ⁹⁹ and to Belgiojoso herself (‘At the same time as these lines, I am writing to Mallefille sending him swiftly to the devil, which I am perfectly entitled to do given his behaviour towards me’).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As an unpublished Konzeptbuch containing draft copies of Liszt's letters shows, Liszt had written on 21 May 1846 to his friend the drama critic Jules Janin to articulate his frustration at what transpired, quoting from correspondence with Mallefille that is no longer extant.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The letter reveals further details, and its relevant paragraphs are given in the Appendix (see p. 431).Footnote ¹⁰² In short, Liszt had paid 1,000 francs in advance to the Frenchman in order to receive the French scenario by the end of February (1846), ‘so that I could take it with me to Vienna and make it rhyme in Italian’.Footnote ¹⁰³ On receiving Liszt's letter cancelling their collaboration, Mallefille requested a further 2,000 francs in advance for the full ‘drama in three acts’, which he promised to send by the end of the month. Liszt resented his ‘republican’ behaviour, adding: ‘In truth I could hardly have imagined that I would be treated like such a cashcow! […] it is simply a scenario (and not a completed work) that I must then have translated into Italian and checked and reshaped in accordance with the exigencies of the Italian stage.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ From the correspondence quoted in Liszt's letter draft, it appears that Mallefille protested that there had been a ‘misunderstanding’ about the timetable, and claimed he had felt obliged to take on other work. He did finally send the scenario on 9 December (GSA 59/156), and while Liszt's response does not survive, the draft records his intention to decline Mallefille's offer and send him ‘two-thirds of the amount which he asks of me’ to end the matter: ‘Amen! Fraternity in death!’Footnote ¹⁰⁵

On 3 January 1847 – with Act 1 of the libretto in hand – Liszt grumbled to d'Agoult that ‘almost nothing has been done’ on the opera.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As the planned première in May 1847 looked increasingly unrealistic, he tacitly abandoned it, later signalling his intention to ‘complete my 3 acts’ upon returning to Weimar in mid-July,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ but in July confirmed that ‘it has been more than 8 months since I have written to Princess Belgiojoso’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In other words, he still lacked a full versified libretto at this time. At some point over the ensuing months he evidently resigned himself to the need for a third poet; Belgiojoso's poet was languishing in prison and appeared to have declared the task beyond him.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Writing to Belloni in February 1848, he anticipates making final arrangements for the première of Sardanapalo with Gustav VaëzFootnote ¹¹⁰ and Giovanni TadoliniFootnote ¹¹¹ ‘by the end of April or May at the latest’. It seems that Tadolini had offered to help procure assistance with the libretto in Belgiojoso's absence: ‘At the same time we shall finish off the Sardanapale in Italian,’ Liszt explains, ‘for which I gratefully accept the good services that M. Tadolini has kindly offered me – I hope that by next September I shall be in possession of the two libretti [Sardanapalo and Richard of Palestine], and then shall set to work immediately.’Footnote ¹¹² It seems that Liszt wrote to Belgiojoso explaining his intention to collaborate with a third poet, to be procured by Tadolini, after receiving negative news about her poet. On 12 May 1848, the princess replies:

Liszt's undated reply (c.June–July 1848) speaks of rekindling ‘a desire, an idea whose postponement I had been resigned to, but which I had scarcely abandoned. Your Sardanapalo comes to me in just as timely a manner as will the two thousand francs for the poet.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ It goes on to duplicate elements of Liszt's message from 6 October 1846, reminding the princess of her responsibility to edit the versified libretto and adding: ‘The notes and commentaries which you added in the margin of Rotondi's libretto (of which I take great care), are witness to such mastery in this genre that there is no wiser course than to have full confidence in your judgment.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ The mention of Rotondi here led Felix Raabe, Searle, Szelènyi-Farago, Kaczmarczyk and others to assume that ‘Rotondi’ was the missing librettist all along.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As Hamilton pointed out, however, the syntax of Liszt's letter suggests that Rotondi's libretto and that expected for Liszt's opera were different.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Indeed they are. Pietro Rotondi was the librettist for an Italian opera on the same topic composed by Giulio Litta in 1844, as noted in Table 1 above. Furthermore, his text has few if any points of close correlation with the libretto that Liszt set. (The title page of Rotondi's libretto is given as Figure 4.)

Figure 4.

The title page of Pietro Rotondi's libretto, Sardanapalo (1844). From the Italian Opera Libretto Collection, Music Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With permission.

After seemingly waiting for Godot, matters moved forward considerably in August 1848. Liszt confirms to d'Agoult that Belgiojoso ‘has just advised me that the Italian libretto for my Sardanapale, which she assures me is a masterpiece, has been sent off; I will set to work on it immediately’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One might argue that this timescale lends credence to Liszt's suspicion that Belgiojoso herself was the librettist: after delaying a year and a half to versify Acts 2–3, the full versified libretto was sent within a month of Liszt's letter reconfirming their collaboration after he threatened to employ Tadolini.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But such hypotheses remain as so many bubbles – vulnerable to the pinprick of evidence.

With the full versified libretto now at hand, Liszt finally began composing the score. He told Raff on 1 August 1849 that his Sardanapalo would be completed during the coming winter (see above, note 38). Raff advised J. J. Schott that composition was under way by 11 April 1850 (‘Right now Liszt is busy working on his opera Sardanapalo’);Footnote ¹²⁰ and Liszt himself confirmed two weeks later that the creative process was finally alight (see again note 38), and set about securing a publishing contract for the opera from Léon Escudier, explaining on 4 February 1851: ‘I decided to work actively on the score. I expect to have a copy ready by the end of next autumn.’ Thus the music for Act 1 which Liszt did compose was almost certainly notated between April 1850 and February 1851. Table 2 summarizes the proposed timeline.

Why, then, did collaborative work cease with composition under way and just as the versified libretto had finally arrived? There are several possible answers, including Liszt's changing relation to Belgiojoso (for a time, potentially a romantic partner), his developing interest in and sympathy for Wagner's music, and the fate of Belgiojoso's unknown Italian poet.Footnote ¹²¹ A less conjectural and more plausible answer than these are the revisions to the final version of the libretto, understood as part of Liszt's aspiration towards what he called ‘musical drama’. With a nod to Occam's razor, then, I believe this to be the simplest, most practical and significant factor and thus focus closing comments on it here.

Liszt's correspondence indicates a consistent concern for the dramatic integrity of his opera. Writing to Grand Duke Carl Alexander on the same day as he fired Mallefille, Liszt explained: ‘You would not be able to believe, my Lord, the time and patience I shall need to carry through my librettos to perfection.’Footnote ¹²² As we have seen, he implored Belgiojoso twice to take personal responsibility for editing the libretto, and on at least two occasions made consequential suggestions regarding the opera's plot: the first regarding the scenario; the second the libretto.

First, on 6 October 1846 he sought to compress the proposed three acts into two:

In the event, Sardanapalo remained a three-act work.Footnote ¹²⁴ But it may be no coincidence that he would voice the same concern about the protracted historical plot of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien (1843), whose performances (he worried in 1854) ‘grow colder and colder continually’.Footnote ¹²⁵ While we cannot know quite when such concerns crystallized in Liszt's mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that he may have been crafting his libretto negatively, with concern for what he saw as the weaknesses of contemporary Franco-Italian opera in mind.

Secondly, on 15 January 1849, Belgiojoso responded to a suggestion that Liszt evidently made but which has not survived:

This complaint – that Liszt's request is unrealistic, unrealizable – is the last known correspondence about the opera between Liszt and Belgiojoso; it is also the only time there is a splitting of egos between the princess and the librettist. On this – frustratingly scant – basis, it seems most plausible that Liszt never drafted the later acts of Sardanapalo in N4 in part for the simple reason that he never received a revised version of them from Belgiojoso, and gave up on pursuing them from a librettist whose work (he worried) needed doctoring and adjusting.

Declamatory style as ‘character’

More broadly, Liszt's two interventions indicate his underlying unease about what a modern libretto ought to entail. Three years after ceasing work on Sardanapalo, he published a series of 13 articles on contemporary opera in the Neue Zeitschrift which range from a historical overview of the genre to criticism of modern librettos and challenges for contemporary singers. His comments arguably retain a self-referential character, for it is librettists and their poetry, rather than musical matters, that dominate the discourse. The universal success of Auber's La muette de Portici was owed ‘to a very fortunate text selection’, he remarked; in contrast, Scribe's librettos for Donizetti are ‘too complicated for the audience’,Footnote ¹²⁷ a representative case being Dom Sébastien, Donizetti's ‘most carefully worked-out production’ – which sought to amass ‘as many situations as possible’ and resulted in a wearying effect of continuous transformation and contrast. ‘During such procedures,’ he went on, ‘insufficient development naturally emerges, which compromises the entire poetic structure, and continually suppresses the portrayal of character,’ adding for good measure: ‘There is hardly any peripeteia.’Footnote ¹²⁸ With these words in mind, there is a glimmer of frustration in his description of the shifting relations between poet and composer that he had inherited for Sardanapalo:

Modern composers’ dependency on librettos and their drama was far greater than in the past, in other words. This observation cum complaint soon crystallized into a full-blown historical schema for the relationship between opera and poetry, setting the stage for what Liszt saw as opera's three elementary phases: an emphasis on the expression of feeling (Metastasio) was followed by an aspiration for dramatic situations that motivate such feelings coherently (Scribe, whose Robert le diable marks ‘the historic moment’ of equal collaboration between poet and composer), and thereafter ‘interest focussed on character development’, whose psychological explication on stage Liszt associates with the Wagner of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.Footnote ¹³⁰ Accordingly, writing to Carl Alexander about his essay on Tannhäuser, Liszt's self-reflexive remark confirms the centrality of the libretto for contemporary opera: ‘This poetical analysis of Wagner's libretto was for me only an opportunity to express something that I feel very deeply.’Footnote ¹³¹

The challenge for modern composers, as Liszt saw it, was to eschew ‘earlier operatic forms’Footnote ¹³² while accommodating the telescoped requirements of opera's three elementary phases (cited above), wherein ‘every metamorphosis in style has enriched opera with a new moment, without suspending earlier moments. The aspiration to achieve situations does not preclude the expression of feeling. Likewise, the portrayal of character is little impeded down the path toward creating situations of expressing feeling.’Footnote ¹³³ Such an accretion of requirements explains why ‘this epoch is at a great disadvantage’, he concludes, perhaps conveying a heaviness of thought that weighed down his own work.Footnote ¹³⁴ Indeed, the surviving libretto to Liszt's single act for Sardanapalo feeds quite naturally into this quietly self-conscious writing about contemporary opera. It survives only as underlay in the continuous draft within N4. Marco Beghelli, Francesca Vella and David Rosen have deciphered and – where necessary – reconstructed this text for our edition; ultimately, very few words were missing or proved illegible, allowing us to access the words Liszt set with reasonable certainty.Footnote ¹³⁵ On this basis, the plot for Act 1 of Liszt's opera can be summarized as follows.

In the royal palace at Nineveh, a chorus of concubines calls Mirra, a Greek slave-girl and favourite of the King, to the harem to raise her spirits (‘Come – your palpitating heart, / Shedding all worry, / Will forget the earth and the sky in ecstasy’). Mirra is unhappy, nostalgic for her lost home and sad about her current situation, but the chorus, unabated, venerates her as de facto queen (‘Among thousands of virgins […] / The king of Assyria has chosen you / Wreathe your brow with garlands of roses and vine leaves’). Despairing, Mirra seeks refuge and peace (‘Have no further thought for me!’) and relates her predicament in an aria and recitative: she is ridden with guilt for loving the man who conquered her homeland, and for adopting his Ashurian faith; she weeps while thinking of her mother on the one hand and of her love for Sardanapalo on the other, angrily declaring herself ‘a slave mocked by fate’. The King enters and asks why she is distressed; eventually she explains only that her adulterous role as his favourite carries no dignity (‘Your wife's vigilant gaze, / Her pallor accuses me’), but the King – infatuated – does not grasp the full circumstances of her unhappiness, promises to encircle her with the splendour of the royal palace and declares his love in a confident duet (‘Let us love as long as / The fervid age still smiles upon us’). While Mirra's predicament remains unresolved, Beleso – a soothsayer (Chaldean) and elder statesman – enters, warning of war. He accuses the King of enjoying comforts while ignoring ‘the inner voice of duty’ as insurgent leaders ready their forces against him. He urges the King to take up arms (‘Throw off your soft garments, / Set aside the distaff, grasp the sword!’) and earn the people's reverence, which only superficially attends the diadem he wears. Sardanapalo hesitates, lamenting that ‘every glory is a lie / If it must be bought with the tears / Of afflicted humankind’. In a lyric passage, Mirra wonders aloud why he is not stirred to ‘noble valour’, and makes a personal plea for action that heralds the moment of peripeteia, as the King is finally persuaded to fight (‘The earth is not vast enough for us to live together in peace […] Your wish will be fulfilled’). The act closes with a grand trio in which Beleso beats the drums of war and Mirra speaks of love inspiring lofty feelings in the King, who professes now to wear his royal purple more easily.

In keeping with Liszt's diagnosis that modern opera was transitioning towards a focus on individual character, the twin foci of the internal struggles of Mirra and Sardanapalo seem fitting: her bifurcated loyalties see her racked between the memory of family and heritage on the one hand and her genuine love for the King on the other; his vision of peaceful coexistence is increasingly exposed as illusory, forcing him to broaden his world-view and embrace the necessity of violence. Indeed, his change of mind – the decision finally to go to war – is the only action of consequence during the act, even though, as Dahlhaus observed of Isolde's love potion, it arguably only brings about what has already been determined by the characters’ psychological needs or ‘inner action’.Footnote ¹³⁶

Far from being spectral nonentities or perfunctory grotesques, such roles are multifaceted, often complex in their motivations. The extent to which their text is scrutable at the level of the word is of course dependent upon how transparently any given utterance has been retrieved from the underlay of N4.Footnote ¹³⁷ Nevertheless, Liszt relates the explication of character on stage genetically to poetry in precisely this way (vis-à-vis Wagner's appropriated philology in Part 2 of Oper und Drama):

The declamatory melodic style referenced here was nothing less than a precondition for the emergence of ‘musical drama’, which Liszt felt was exemplified in the dramatic action of Meyerbeer's Robert and Rossini's Otello in particular.Footnote ¹³⁹ In Sardanapalo, he draws on declamatory melody freely for all three principal roles, often to deliver kinetic text in moments of agitation. Consider the following three examples. When Mirra, alone, reflects angrily on her situation, the vocal line is structured by opposing tendencies: driven downwards by the surface voice-leading of falling semitones and upwards by the rising chromatic sequences. As Example 2 shows, a lamentation affect (cf. planctus / pianto) peppers the melodic line (bars 381, 383, 385, 389, 397–8, 401–2), while also underpinning rising sequences (LH, bars 380–5). Like the verses of Tannhäuser's hymn to Venus, both lines of Mirra's cri de coeur (‘Slave, alone, mocked by fate! / An error tempted my heart’) are repeated up a semitone, separately, even as the repeated monotone pitches they contain offer licence for declamatory delivery. Indeed, the use of monotone recitation is itself characteristic; in bars 967–71 (see Example 3), Sardanapalo decries the vanity of royally sanctioned violence on nothing but repeated e ♮ʹs (‘I am not deceived by the easy boast / Of a fleeting glory’). And in his first speech to the King, Beleso urges Sardanapalo to confront his regal responsibilities and stop indulging his desires while ignoring ‘the inner voice of duty’. Beleso's monosyllabic, rhythmically strident lines, given in Example 4, are decidedly unlike the structured bel canto expressiveness found in Liszt's transcriptions of Bellini and Donizetti. Alongside their rising chromatic sequences, the short, articulated phrases (bars 898–905), irregular phrase lengths and repeated declamatory pitches (bars 879–82, 885) point to Liszt's determination to write character, breath and agogic utterance into the shape of the melodic lines, resulting in an idiom we might more readily associate with the stylistic impulses of French ‘declamatory’ opera, or what Vincent d'Indy would later describe as a mode of drama ‘frequently even subordinating the musical form, the musical number, to the demands of the dramatic tone and the dynamics of the plot’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Example 2.

Liszt's declamatory melodic style in Sardanapalo, bars 377–403. Edition © David Trippett.

Example 3.

Sardanapalo's monotone recitation, Sardanapalo, bars 967–71. Edition © David Trippett.

Example 4.

Beleso in dialogue with the King, illustrating Liszt's declamatory melody, with its character-driven, accented utterances; Sardanapalo, bars 875–905. Edition © David Trippett.

Harmonically, such passages also suggest that Hamilton's preliminary conclusion – that the music of N4 gives ‘the effect of a work written by two different composers’, where Liszt's chromatic language is reserved for the orchestra while ‘he seems frequently to rein [this] in […] as soon as the voice enters’ – may be unduly schematic.Footnote ¹⁴¹ On the contrary, such declamatory moments indicate the extent to which Liszt's vocal parts find expression outside diatonic Italianate melodic shapes, even as they observe a certain unrevised bel canto expressiveness; the examples above indicate that they share in the language of mid-century chromatic voice-leading as palpably as the conventions of expression that Liszt felt had shackled Rossini.

Methodologically, the problematic practice of reading composers’ reflections into analyses of their musical style (as though this could offer a closed circuit, insulated from the complex multitude of external and internal factors) is less indulgent in this case than it may seem. For Liszt's music in N4 never received critical attention, even from his inner circle at the Altenburg. It may never have been heard by anyone but him. Ipso facto, there is little option but to adopt such an approach for the present study, if the perspective of historical criticism is to be incorporated. On this basis it is telling that Liszt's contemporary writings posit the declamatory style as explicitly future-orientated, so much so that in his landmark essay (1855) on Berlioz's symphony Harold en Italie he twinned its role in modern opera with that of programmes in the modern symphony:

Earlier that year, Liszt had conducted Schumann's Genoveva (1850), with its declamatory ‘recitative in time’ (Recitativ im Takt), remarking that despite its shortcomings as drama, and excepting Wagner's works, he preferred it to all operas of the past 50 years.Footnote ¹⁴³ Did it represent the fruit of a move away from ‘the cult of stereotypical melody’, a move he saw initiated by Meyerbeer's Robert?Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Perhaps. In any case, the historical inevitability driving both developments – declamation and programmes – is given as an ever more magnetic union of music and great literature, a union whose genetic relation to vocal music (that is, music with text) he confirms later in the same essay:

Described three years after work on Sardanapalo had ceased, this high-stakes scenario raises the possibility of an autobiographical reading in which Liszt-as-composer felt threatened with ‘utter destruction’, his own internal ‘mountain spirits’ stymieing progress on the opera, whose rich shafts of artistic ore had tempted a ‘bold miner’ such as him for seven years (rhetorically, perhaps an allusion to Wagner's ‘boldest sailor’ or Beethoven-as-Columbus, who first traversed the ‘apparently shoreless sea of absolute music’).Footnote ¹⁴⁶

If Liszt pointedly omitted Byron from ‘such names as Dante and Shakespeare’, his inclusion in this pantheon of literary minds channelling ‘inspiration unknown to antiquity’ had been intimated a year earlier. Liszt's conceit for the organic magnificence of Romeo and Juliet provides a tangible link to Byron's Sardanapalus:

Such imagery flickers against the shadow of his own operatic subject, the self-immolation of Sardanapalo and Mirra, where ‘fragrant and flowing flames’ echo Byron's command: ‘Bring cedar too, and precious drugs, and spices […] Bring frankincense and myrrh, too for it is / For a great sacrifice I build the pyre.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Coded references rarely amount to conclusive evidence, but Liszt's wholesale borrowing of the imagery of Sardanapalus to interpret Romeo and Juliet at least suggests the comparable esteem in which he held these tragedies – perhaps, as it turns out, an esteem tipping into acute sensitivity, even inhibition.

In this context it is unsurprising that close correspondences exist between Byron's tragedy and the libretto Liszt sourced via Belgiojoso. At first blush, this suggests that the author of Liszt's libretto was borrowing directly from Byron in places. Three examples are shown in Table 3. But if such semblances suggest a dependent relationship, clear differences between the plot of Byron's text and Liszt's libretto undermine any structural comparison.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Byron's characters would sustain Liszt's creative work for several decades, of course. Central to Liszt's advocacy of musical progress is the need for individual character to be expressed via the most apposite medium, where the rules of genre do not inhibit what he saw as the goal of communicating a literary-musical art to modern audiences. ‘There are characters and feelings which can attain full development only in the dramatic; there are others which in no wise tolerate the limitations and restrictions of the stage.’Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Declamatory melody has a part to play in the former, while in the latter, written programmes can bestow on instrumental music ‘the character of the ode, of the dithyramb, or the elegy, in a word, of any form of lyric poetry’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Contemporaneous aestheticians would probe such claims sceptically, so we might conclude only that within a forward-looking union of music and literature, cast in the shadow of Byron, the variety of character-types and their necessary expressive freedoms justify – for Liszt – loosening ties equally with the established forms of Italian opera and with the Viennese symphony.

Pro and contra Italy

If Liszt's veneration of great literature lurks in the background to his ambitions in opera, this is typically expressed negatively, in critical remarks on Italian opera. See, for instance, caustic denunciations of Bellini's treatment of the Romeo and Juliet story (I Capuleti e i Montecchi) and Donizetti's vis-à-vis Hugo (Lucrezia Borgia). If Hugo's poetic intentions are ‘mutilated for the sake of operatic shenanigans’,Footnote ¹⁵² Bellini and Felice Romani provoke outright anger in Liszt:

Brutalizing literature for opera's convenience is unforgivable, in other words – a view he held consistently. During the late 1830s, Liszt drew on familiar anti-Italian prejudice to deny literary depth to Italian operatic culture at large. These were – for him – simply antithetical: ‘Everything in the field of art corresponding to the feelings immortally exemplified by Hamlet, Faust, Childe Harold, René, Obermann, and Lélia’, he avers, ‘is for the Italians a foreign, barbaric tongue that they reject in horror.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rossini is an exception that proves the rule, we learn; his ‘fully strung lyre [… scarcely] sounded anything but the melodic string for [Italian audiences, whom he treated] like spoiled children, entertaining them as they wanted to be entertained.’ Rhetoric identifies Liszt's own bias: ‘And who is to do what Rossini did not attempt?’ he asks.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ It is hard not to read this as prescient, as Liszt throwing down the gauntlet and declaring his ambition in Sardanapalo to do precisely ‘what Rossini did not attempt’, that is, envisage a reformed Italian opera for which the feelings evoked by a Faust, a Hamlet or a Childe Harold are not ‘a foreign, barbaric tongue’. But there is no evidence that Liszt harboured ambitions for opera at the time. Nevertheless, his conclusion that great literature cannot receive adequate treatment within the idiom of Italian opera reinforces the view that – around mid-century – he sought difference rather than emulation for Sardanapalo.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

This view is substantiated perhaps most clearly in Liszt's review of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia from 1838. After observing that Romani's libretto follows Hugo's drama ‘step by step’ (excepting one alteration resulting from the censors’ ‘limits of daring’), he reflects on the ripe possibilities:

There follows an inevitable fall:

Strongly accented, broken, declaimed phrases would seem an apt description of Beleso's music given above as he angrily confronts the King (Example 4). Yet alongside such decidedly un-Italianate declamatory melodies, Liszt adheres inconsistently to Italian operatic style in his music for Sardanapalo, complicating the catalogue of rejections given above, both of Italian librettos and of their musical setting. This raises the question of what Liszt's underlying opinion might have been of the ‘pleasant, flowing, and melodious’ Italian style that he damned with faint praise, yet incorporated by degree into his own opera 12 years later.

The opening chorus of concubines (see Example 5a) offers an instance of close stylistic adherence. Liszt's chains of parallel thirds and sixths supported by a mostly diatonic, chordal accompaniment leading to an alternating V–I over a dominant pedal mimic the stylistic fingerprints of Donizetti and others which Liszt had absorbed as a touring virtuoso. His own Soirées italiennes (1839), containing piano arrangements of short arias and nocturnes by Mercadante and Donizetti, provides a sample of the stylistic elements he associated with them. As Example 5b shows, Liszt's Barcarolle after Donizetti contains a strikingly similar texture, stripped of the vocal line: the same parallel motion in the right hand, the same chordal accompaniment and pedal point in the left, and the same harmonic rhythm, albeit bereft of Liszt's submediant interruptions and augmented sixths. The ‘Italianate’ aesthetic of each – individuated at the keyboard – is analogous, in other words.

Example 5a.

The Italianate chorus of concubines in Liszt's Sardanapalo, scene 1, bars 111–24. Edition © David Trippett.

Example 5b.

Liszt's 1839 arrangement of Donizetti's Barcarolle from the collection of arias and nocturnes Nuits d’été à Pausilippe (1836), bars 19–26.

In like manner, Example 6 shows the rhythmic and melodic profile of Liszt's principal march theme itself to be characteristic of duple-time Italian marches, complete with rising sixth and dotted second beat with rising semitone. Indeed, excepting its mediant harmony, it appears to be modelled on the theme for Liszt's variation set Hexaméron, Bellini's ‘Suoni la tromba’ (1839), although as the example suggests various other such patterns exist in the repertory, from Wagner's Rienzi to Donizetti's Lucia.

Example 6.

Rhythmic modelling in duple-time Italianate march themes from (a) Liszt, (b) Bellini, (c) Donizetti and (d) Wagner.

Liszt's correspondence suggests that his estimation of such music is low, however. Writing of Donizetti's Nuits d’été à Pausilippe, from which he selected three items for piano arrangement (including the Barcarolle given above), he tells a friend that he made only three arrangements ‘because I couldn't succeed in finding any more in that wretched album’. Continuing: ‘They are three baubles I have been asked for here and which are worth neither praise nor blame. I don't want to write to [the publisher] Bernard [Latte] about so small a matter, but will send him a long letter when dispatching proofs of the Album d'un voyageur II.’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The hierarchical disparagement vis-à-vis his original composition is clear, yet it seems he absorbed and deployed precisely this style for his own opera. How are we to reconcile this adherence to Italianate idiom with Liszt's apparent rejection of the same? Put more provocatively, why compose in so contentious a borrowed language?

Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, there is a distinction between Liszt's critical view of Italian opera, where he objects to what he sees as inappropriate word–music relations and superficial entertainment, and the actual musical idiom of Italian opera, in which he immersed himself through transcriptions and variation sets, and which proved an important vehicle in his successful European tours. Secondly, arising from this is his self-reflection that aesthetic pleasure must engage more than the senses: ‘It is utterly impossible for me to enjoy anything that appeals only to my ears, without my mind and my emotions also taking a part, a very large part, in my enjoyment.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This statement from 1838 taps into a well-documented trope of Germanic criticism of Italian opera, but it also posits an aesthetics of comprehension, the need to engage the other hemisphere, as it were, which we might interpret as a yearning for literary fulfilment. In short, while it is possible that Liszt simply adhered to Italianate idiom out of habit, or perhaps in anticipation of listener expectation, the fact that allusions to Italian style are broadly restricted to the first two scenes of his completed act for Sardanapalo suggests that Liszt started composing in this way for the three-part chorus and changed direction for the solo parts. We cannot, however, rule out the possibility that he felt sufficiently fluent in Italianate and declamatory styles that he did not draw rigid distinctions in the context of his opera.

But what of the ostensive use of Italian forms? The opera contains four discrete chunks of musical architecture that appear to adhere to the traditional scene structure of Italian opera. The two earlier, provisional attempts to interpret the opera's structure – Hamilton (1996) and James (2009) – were rooted in the ‘solita forma’ tradition. By necessity these were speculative, produced without an edition and with very little sense of the libretto that would give rise to such forms. After Hamilton itemized the forces performing each section, James analysed Liszt's ‘sketches’ exclusively within the retrospective parameters of primo ottocento Italian opera, subdividing the music into existing categories of tempo d'attacca, tempo di mezzo, cabaletta and so on.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Acknowledging these initial approaches, and accepting the procrustean caveat, a synoptic overview based on the full edition might look as follows:

As conventional as this appears, it masks a multitude of idiosyncrasies. First, even while it seems the anonymous librettist was fully conversant with the rhyming and metrical requirements of Italian forms, certain conventions are ignored or explicitly rejected, such as the narrative motivation for switching from tempo di mezzo to cabaletta. Equally, even when the libretto is clear in its adherence to Italian forms, Liszt's setting does not necessarily follow these. Consider the opening of the final trio, whose text is given in Table 4, and a segment of whose music is given in Example 4.Footnote ¹⁶² The librettist begins with 16 lines of blank verse, which he expects to be set as recitative, then there are two five-line stanzas of eight syllables for each of the three characters, which – we might presume – would be set as a slow movement. But Liszt treats all this as kinetic text for declamatory melody; and only Mirra is given a correspondingly lyrical setting. Hence, it is difficult to know where Liszt and the librettist deviate explicitly from convention, and when they may be working in ignorance of convention.Footnote ¹⁶³ The result is a highly idiosyncratic stretch of music, and it would seem unnecessarily Procrustean to read it more rigorously in terms of ‘solita forma’, particularly given Liszt's publicly stated inclination to eschew old operatic forms,Footnote ¹⁶⁴ his immersion in grand opera (including particularly Rossini's Guillaume Tell and its predecessor, Le siège de Corinthe) with its inherent eclecticism and flexibility, and his veneration of singers who broke free from the performance conventions associated with such forms.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

TABLE 4a portion of the libretto from scene iii of sardanapalo, illustrating liszt's interpolations and decision to ignore the implications of the anonymous poet's distinction between metrical verse and recitative

If we return to Liszt's ‘Harold’ essay one last time, restriction, limits and a ship's narrow listing are all terms Liszt uses to explain why opera is not appropriate for every composer, despite having previously been assumed to be essential for admission to ‘the musical guild or brotherhood’. Recall that precisely this assumption lay behind his plan in 1841 to dovetail his retirement as a virtuoso with an opera première. Writing with the 1,256 bars of his Sardanapalo draft three years behind him, this passage reads as nothing less than a frank confession over his aborted opera project, even a retrospective justification. For that reason, it is quoted here at length:

The gloriously mixed metaphors – a contest, slippery boards, a tightrope, golden skates – evoke a grubby, juvenile circus act more than a rite of passage. And a devalued bill of exchange, a ‘draft to be discounted by the present’, offers an all-too-transparent description of the thinning currency of his Italianate opera, abandoned – he implies – amid a certain embitterment. After seven years of dogged effort to enter ‘the musical guild’, Liszt's opera had floundered, a situation all but explicated publicly here as a necessary rejection of ‘the narrow confines of the stage’, the ‘constraining laws’ of opera.

To read this as implying Italian forms only would be to reify a more complex message about enactment and visual presence. Back in 1845, Liszt's unfulfilled plans for a stage work on Dante's Divina commedia, hatched in tandem with the poet Joseph Autran, envisaged ‘a combination of diorama, poetry and music’ precisely to render Dante's poem in the present tense, as staged drama, wherein ‘the staging could help to make Dante's and Virgil's journey more sensible to the eyes of the public’ and where ‘the orchestra would fill all the gaps of the two poets walking, and complete the illusion for the senses and the mind’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ With its combination of projected images, music, poetry and staging, Liszt's planned ‘multimedia opera’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ never came to be. But its ideal conception here underscores his open-mindedness in broaching an aesthetics of narrative communication through sound and light, a technologically higher realm ‘governed by fewer constraining laws’ than opera. Writing in 1855, Liszt had found a new habitaculum in symphonic expression, and it is indicative of the enduring role of an operatic imagination that his ensuing ‘Dante’ Symphony (1855–6), incorporating female chorus, was conceived with the simultaneous projection of images by Giovanni Genelli in mind.

What does this mean for Liszt's historiographic status? Recall that an alchemy of expression, envisaged through the merger of literary narrative and musical form, was something of a holy grail for mid-nineteenth-century aesthetics: ‘to show that true music suggests analogous ideas to different minds’, in Baudelaire's formulation.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ As we have seen, Liszt indicated in 1855 that he believed this could be accomplished appositely for different poetic characters according to different artistic media, whether symphony orchestra or the operatic stage. With the visual dimension of staged opera or projected images in mind, it is unsurprising that Liszt's first use of the term ‘poëme symphonique / symphonische Dichtung’ was not, as is typically reported, that used to describe Tasso in the programme booklet for a concert on 19 April 1854, whereafter Liszt described both Les préludes and Orpheus to Hans von Bülow as ‘poèmes symphoniques’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In fact, he uses the term in both the French and the German versions of his essay on Tannhäuser in 1849, to refer to the opera's overture (possessing formal coherence on its own poetic terms) – that is, to connote an instrumental-poetic expression synoptic of a visualized, operatic narrative pinned to a libretto, and this within months of beginning compositional work on his own opera.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In this way, it is possible to argue that the narrative character he attributed to and cultivated within symphonic music bears a structural relation to opera, even as it had been probed through earlier works at the keyboard. Two pieces of evidence help substantiate the claim:

1. 1. The first draft of Tasso: Lamento e trionfo in N5 (1847) is notated in essentially the same marked-up keyboard score as the first piano-vocal draft of Sardanapalo in N4 (1850–1), with instrumental cues and part differentiation peppering music that spans 2–3 staves. Figures 5a and 5b show the respective openings pages of each draft. These scores constitute the first continuous draft of each work, and were designed for Liszt's assistants (Conradi and Raff, respectively) to orchestrate provisionally. Their similarities suggest that Liszt's compositional methods in symphony and opera were not dissimilar, at least during the late 1840s and early 1850s, when he engaged the genres coevally.

2. 2. There is at least one thematic transformation in Sardanapalo. Liszt's modification of a turning chromatic line (perhaps reminiscent of Schubert's final Impromptu, D.899 no. 4) is shown in Example 7. Here the transformation of rhythmic and harmonic character is harnessed to Beleso's shifting dramatic contexts, making moot the distinction between a symphonic and a narrative logic proffered above (although the quantitative reality that only a couple of examples exist in the opera's first act also bears consideration).

Figure 5a.

Liszt's first draft of Tasso: Lamento e trionfo, dated 1847, written in score format playable at the keyboard, and showing instrumentation cues. GSA 60/N5, fol. 28^r. Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

Figure 5b.

The first page of Liszt's draft for Sardanapalo, c.1850, written in a score format similar to that in Figure 5a, and showing similar instrumentation cues. GSA 60/N4, fol. 2^r. Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

Example 7.

The thematic transformation proper of a chromatic turning figure. Liszt, Sardanapalo, bars 836–9, 913–16, 1082–5. Edition © David Trippett.

Considering the breadth of Liszt's ambitions, it is perhaps no surprise that techniques more commonly associated with instrumental music, and which would serve to cement Liszt's early twentieth-century status as a symphonic composer, are deployed here. But the implications are striking. In this case, Liszt's technical methods drew surprisingly few distinctions between genres with or without words, it seems, even as he himself drew distinctions in theory, designating certain types of poetic content (such as the ‘philosophical epic’, with its succession of soul states (Seelenzustände)) more suitable for symphonic treatment, while others are better suited to the stage. Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais, one of the writers – and confidants – of signal importance for Liszt during the early 1830s,Footnote ¹⁷² had tempered his Esquisse d'une philosophie (1840) in this regard. After extolling the closely fixable relation between sound and the feelings it represents or excites (‘an active yet strictly determined relationship – one that calls for a special power that is latent in sound, a power that springs from rhythm, movement and measure’), Lamennais asserts the human voice as originary to this principle of expression:

Lamennais was working on this text when Liszt first visited him in 1834, and they corresponded well into 1845 (when Liszt first resolved to set Byron's tragedy as Sardanapalo, and set Lamennais's own poetry for male chorus in Le forgeron), so it is reasonable to assume Liszt was familiar with this argument.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ One possible conclusion to draw is that Liszt considered an aesthetics of primary vocality to be intrinsic to the potential for intelligible communication, regardless of medium; and this would later be theorized within the terms of instrumental programme music. To what extent, then, did that ‘strictly determined relationship’ between sound and feeling rest on the expressive sound of the voice? Back in 1838, Liszt wrote candidly to his mother about the lessons he was absorbing from Italian music in this vein: ‘I have just spent a month in Genoa […] my music is easier to read, having become more song-like and intelligible.’Footnote ¹⁷⁵ And in 1844, d'Agoult reported that his new vocal music was being composed ‘in a style half way between Germany and Italy, but which is nevertheless new and effective’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Holding the generality of such comments in abeyance, we might say that the expressive voice of opera was subsumed both within and in opposition to his later symphonic aspirations.

Closing thoughts

It is an obvious limitation of this article – as of all previous comments concerning the opera – that a facsimile of N4 is not yet available. But the excerpts given above should offer the reader at least a general impression of the music, in anticipation of the edition of Act 1. Producing such an edition involves a certain amount of reverse engineering: not only regarding the accompanimental ‘gaps’, but also in deciphering the order of revisions, interpreting absent accidentals and determining text underlay with what in some parts remains incomplete evidence. This is based on the reasoned assumption that Liszt had a detailed, worked-out conception of the music for Act 1 he was notating.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ What survives of Sardanapalo therefore constitutes a fragment in Schlegel's sense of something complete in itself and yet essentially incomplete in its opposition to other fragments (rather than a Bruchstück, ‘the detached piece pure and simple […] the residue of a broken ensemble’).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ A fragment, ‘like a small work of art’ – Schlegel famously remarked – ‘has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself’, obtaining a certain unity even while it remains incomplete in the perspective it opens up.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This paradox would seem to capture the identity of Sardanapalo's single act. Such a finished condition is undeserving of the ire historically attendant on so-called completions of ‘incomplete’ music, whether Robert Winter persuasively taking to task Barry Cooper's ‘speculative completion’ of ‘Beethoven's Tenth’ or Paul Henry Lang's uncompromising words from 1966 that ‘one never hears of an archaeologist adding a missing arm of his own making to a recovered Venus, nor would his musicologist colleague do any such thing to a symphony’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ On the contrary, the recovered music of N4 offers something closer to a newly uncovered archaeological site, rich in evidence for tracing the merger of Liszt's Italianate idioms and developing harmonic praxis within the nationalist debates of the 1850s.

The result affords us a fresh understanding of his aesthetic orientation during the mid-century. The very existence of Sardanapalo's music resituates Liszt's impulse towards musicking great literature or the stories of great characters as an endeavour first cultivated through piano collections such as Album d'un voyageur and radically channelled through the enactment on stage of operatic subjects, whose ultimate failure resulted from inadequate librettos and Liszt's unease in relying on other writers (in contrast to Wagner's self-sufficiency). The alacrity with which Liszt sought to set about composing music for Sardanapalo – after eventually receiving the libretto – and the completed music itself also suggest that he was undaunted by composing operatic music as such. That he was working on the opera in earnest at the same time as composing his first three symphonic poems indicates that his drive to bridge a literary and musical imagination was strikingly indifferent to its medium. That is, his working practices appear to be essentially similar for both genres (as Figures 5a and 5b show), suggesting that he did not distinguish between the respective compositional challenges on technical grounds.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The critical difference lay in the status of original literary texts; that is, the challenge of accepting another's libretto that digested an original text rather than writing a verbal programme about music that reflected an original text. The former proved an uncrossable Rubicon for Liszt, whose primary cathexis or emotional investment in certain venerated authors made it correspondingly difficult for him to trust their paraphrasers.Footnote ¹⁸²

In the end, Liszt's remark to d'Agoult – ‘I have simply asked for my turn at the Opéra and nothing but that’ – would prove deceptive in at least two senses: it was for a time his burning ambition rather than an idle stab at a new genre, and it would prove no simple matter.Footnote ¹⁸³ In a final poetic turn, the fragmentary offering that is Liszt's Sardanapalo is scripted into the very distance between its composer and its librettist, who ostensibly never met, and whose broken collaborative enterprise is testament to the pathos in Liszt's creative associations. With paragons of drama in mind, he sought in Sardanapalo an opera that honoured Byron's play to an inhibiting degree; the poetic fragment is therefore perhaps the most apt form for an offering born of such unchecked idealism.