Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018 Vol. 143, No. 2, 361–432, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2018.1507120 An Uncrossable Rubicon: Liszt’s Sardanapalo Revisited DAVID TRIPPETT Liszt and opera Liszt’s brief career as an operatic composer is rarely taken seriously today. Despite a battery of operatic transcriptions and a storied variation set on Bellini’s ‘Suoni la tromba’ (I puritani), his only completed opera, Don Sanche (1825), is typically classed as an unsuccessful juvenile work of dubious authorship.1 All other planned operas of the 1840s and 1850s remained the embryos of ambition, including Richard of Palestine (Walter Scott), Le corsaire (Byron/Dumas), Consuelo (George Sand), Jankó (Karl Beck), Spartacus (Oscar Wolf), Marguerite (Goethe),2 Divina commedia (Dante/Autran), Email:
[email protected] While preparing this article I have accrued a number of debts. I am grateful to my collaborators Francesca Vella, David Rosen and Marco Beghelli; to Dana Gooley and Roger Parker, both of whom ofered helpful thoughts on earlier versions of this article; to the readers for and editors of this journal; and to the many who made insightful comments following talks I gave on this topic at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham and Lviv, as well as at conferences in Bern (Tosc@Bern) and Huddersield (Twentieth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music). Naturally, any infelicities of expression or idea that remain are my own. I also record my thanks to the European Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, whose funding (ERC Starting Grant DTHPS ‘Sound and Materialism in the Nineteenth Century’ and a Philip Leverhulme Prize respectively) made this work possible.