Sardanapale

Sardanapale (French for Sardanapalus), S.687, is an unfinished opera by Franz Liszt based loosely on the 1821 verse play Sardanapalus by Lord Byron.

Liszt was motivated to write a large scale opera at least partly in an attempt to be recognised as more than a travelling keyboard virtuoso. (His early one-act opera, Don Sanche, could hardly qualify to raise his status.) Originally he intended to write an opera based on Byron's The Corsair, and even obtained in 1844 a libretto by Alexandre Dumas. Eventually in 1845 he settled on the subject of Sardanapalus. At this time Liszt was working at the court in Weimar, but may have had his eyes on opportunities at the Hoftheater, Vienna, where the Kapellmeister, Gaetano Donizetti, was seriously ill (although he did not in fact die until 1848). A large-scale opera could have placed Liszt in the running for Donizetti's influential post, as he wrote in an 1846 letter to the Comtesse d'Agoult. In correspondence with his close associate the Princess Belgiojoso, Liszt planned to have the opera performed in Milan in 1846-7.

Sardanapalus was, according to the writer Ctesias, the last king of Assyria. Some have identified him with Assurbanipal, but the Sardanapalus of Ctesias, "an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide" is not an identifiable historical character. Ctesias's tale (the original is lost) was preserved by Diodorus Siculus, and it is on this account that Byron based his play.

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