Franz Liszt - Sardanapalo, Mazeppa

The Guardian 80

El-Khoury / Hernández / Pushniak / Staatskapelle Weimar / Karabits (Audite)
Musicologist David Trippet skilfully reconstructs a Liszt opera fragment, illustrating the composer’s fertile musical mind

Received wisdom has been that Liszt wrote only one opera, and that it’s not very good; even the composer’s most dedicated admirers dismiss the teenage composer’s Don Sanche as a work of unpolished youth and/or dubious authorship. And yet all this time a sizeable chunk of genuine, mature Liszt opera has been hiding, as the musicologist David Trippett notes, in plain sight. Early in 1850, Liszt began to set a libretto based on Byron’s Sardanapalus. Two years later, he abandoned it; but the first act is there in his notebook, complete enough for Trippett to have reconstructed it with only a little conjecture as to what Liszt might have had in mind. This CD is the result, comprising the first act of Sardanapalo alongside the composer’s symphonic poem Mazeppa.