Sardanapalo – Liszt’s Lost Opera

Reconstructing Franz Liszt’s Italian Opera, Sardanapalo

While investigating the agency of sonic objects, and specifically the gap between tactile sonic objects and auditory sensation in the mid-19th century, David Trippett began examining an incomplete manuscript by Franz Liszt, whose contents had been dismissed as fragmentary and often illegible (La Mara 1911; Searle 1954; James 2009). After forensic examination, this turned out to contain not some inconsequential fragments of music, but the full, continuous draft for the first act of an Italian opera.

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sample aria