Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T18:13:32.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Not with a bang but a whimper: The death of Liszt's Sardanapale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Kenneth Hamilton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Few things are more comforting to those with a tendency to procrastination than the knowledge that the fault is hardly unique. Few examples of procrastination are as magnificently extended, or should offer more solace to an author who has missed a deadline, as the history of Liszt's Sardanapale. Not only is the protracted gestation of this ultimately abandoned opera fascinating in its own right, and central to our view of Liszt's early Weimar years; it also illustrates a familiar maxim that in music, as in other human activities, the amount of talk is often in inverse proportion to the action.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 45 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Schumann, , Music and Musicians, trans. Ritter, F. (London, 1878) I, 351.Google Scholar

2 Raff, Helene, Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff im Spiegel ibrer Brife, in Die Musik, 1.2 (1901), 866.Google Scholar

3 Quoted from Chantavoine, Jean, Franz Liszt Pages Romantiques (Paris, 1912), 134–5.Google Scholar

4 Vier, Jacques, Franz Liszt. L'Artiste—Le Clerc. Documents Inédits (Paris, 1950), 58.Google Scholar

5 Ollivier, Daniel, Autour de Madame d' Agoult et de Liszt (Paris, 1941), 181–2Google Scholar. Subsequent page numbers will be in the main text.

6 Ollivier, , Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d'Agoult (Paris, 1933–1934), II, 209Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., II, 332.

8 Vier, , Franz Liszt, 68Google Scholar.

9 Searle, Humphrey, The Music of Liszt 2nd edn (New York, 1966), 89–91Google Scholar. See also Winklhofer, Sharon, Liszt's Sonata in B-minor (Ann Arbor, 1980), 21–4Google Scholar, and Szelényi, László, ‘Liszt's Opernplane’, in Liszt Studien, 1 (Graz, 1977), 218–19.Google Scholar

10 Ollivier, , Correspondance, II, 355.Google Scholar

11 Mara, La, Briefwechsel Zwischen Franz Liszt and Carl Alexander (Leipzig, 1909), 10.Google Scholar

12 Mara, La, Franz Liszts Briefe, VIII (Leipzig, 1905), 62.Google Scholar

13 Raff, , Briefe, I, 287.Google Scholar

14 Mara, La, Briefe, VIII, 62.Google Scholar

15 Hueffner, Francis, The Liszt- Wagner Correspondence, I (London, 1888), 133.Google Scholar

16 I am very grateful to Italian linguist Dr Carol Clarke of Balliol College, Oxford, for assisting with the translation of the Sardanapale libretto.