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.
Liszt’s mind, as ever, seems to resemble a vast repository of all the music of the 19th century. The opening music, which sets the scene with favourite concubine Mirra in Assyrian King Sardanapalo’s harem, moves from something like Mendelssohnian fairy music to a worldly little waltz that wouldn’t sound out of place in La Traviata, which Verdi would write three years later. It’s rooted in Italian tradition; and yet some of Liszt’s glittering textures seem to look half a century ahead to Richard Strauss. Then, around every corner, there is Wagner; Liszt had recently conducted an early performance of Lohengrin, and there’s a Wagnerian slant to the harmony as well as a corresponding grandeur of scope.
Could Liszt have become a great operatic composer, too? The music of Sardanapalo is a sometimes heavy-handed melange, but that’s not a charge to which Wagner’s early works are immune. A libretto in which nothing happens in the whole first act is no help. Liszt soon let go of his operatic ambitions and focused on symphonic poems such as Mazeppa, a dynamic performance of which, by the Staatskapelle Weimar, opens this disc. Kirill Karabits conducts this and Sardanapalo with pace and purpose, and his singers are strong if not subtle: Joyce El-Khoury makes an impassioned if sometimes squally Mirra, tenor Airam Hernández is ardent as the king, and Oleksandr Pushniak sings the traditional-spoilsport-bass role of Beleso with all due gravitas.
Also out this week
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s disc of Schubert’s Symphonies Nos 3, 5 and 8. It’s labelled Volume 1, and if conductor Edward Gardner can keep conjuring playing as lithe and light-footed as this, then Volumes 2 and 3 will be well worth looking out for.
