Franz Liszt’s time as court conductor for the grand duke of Weimar was his most bountiful. It was between 1842 and 1861 that he composed 15 of his 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies. He also began work on an Italian opera based on “Sardanapalus”, Byron’s Assyrian tragedy. Why Liszt abandoned it in 1851 is unknown. But almost 170 years later David Trippett, a music lecturer at the University of Cambridge, discovered an incomplete draft in the Goethe-Schiller archive in Weimar. For three years Mr Trippett and his team worked meticulously on the score, largely written in shorthand. The surviving music is “breathtaking”, he enthuses about the mostly preserved first act. Tomorrow it will be given its long-anticipated premiere, conducted by Kirill Karabits and performed by the Staatskapelle Weimar. The libretto of “Sardanapalo”, the story of the last king of ancient Assyria—today’s Syria, northern Iraq and parts of Turkey and Iran—still resonates today.