As soprano Joyce El-Khoury launches into a soaring F-major aria and the orchestra follows with a booming theatrical march, David Trippett, his head sunk in concentration over a large score, gives his nod of approval.



Trippett is Cambridge University’s senior lecturer in music. “Just to think,” he says, “this music might well have been left undisturbed in the archive for another hundred years.”

Instead, thanks to Trippett’s dogged determination to translate and decipher a neglected sketchbook of composition by Franz Liszt, the work, the first act of an Italian opera called Sardanapalo written almost 170 years ago, is having life breathed into it for the first time.

In the rehearsal room of the Staatskapelle Weimar orchestra, which the Hungarian-born Liszt conducted for 16 years from 1842, the musicians are practising ahead of the work’s official world premiere on Sunday evening.

El-Khoury, a Lebanese-Canadian who specialises in bel canto – a rich and lyrical type of operatic singing – says she did not hesitate to take on the main female role of Myrrha. “It is spine-tingling to be giving voice to a work which has never been heard before, with singers, chorus and orchestra, and to feel it literally lift off the page,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Weimar, the home town of the orchestra Liszt conducted for 16 years. Photograph: Maik Schuck

Trippett spent more than three years poring over the 111-page manuscript, having heard about it when he was a student at the Leipzig Academy of Music in 2004. “Everyone knew about it: it had been catalogued in 1910, and lots of people had looked at it,” he says. “But most music scholars considered it to have too many gaping holes.”

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At the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar, which holds the world’s largest collection of Liszt works, including 14,000 pages of musical notes, Trippett sought out the sketchbook in which Liszt had written his initial scribblings for the opera, and opened it at a random page.

“What I saw was the F-major aria ... the melody was there, the accompaniment was there. It was beautiful, lyrical,” he says. “The text was decipherable, and I thought this could clearly be heard. I was hearing the score in my head and it was burning. I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been performed before.”

The reason was the challenge involved in deciphering Liszt’s many abbreviations, to find the patterns in the score. He calls it “reverse engineering: to be able to fill in some of the big gaping holes and be able to make the leap into sound”.

Once he had completed the painstaking work, he submitted Sardanapalo to the scholarly body in Hungary that oversees Liszt’s cultural legacy. “They were sceptical at first, and I appreciated that, but they soon said what I’d done made sense and gave it their blessing. So we can hold our heads up high and say this really is Liszt.”

There are several theories as to why Liszt – far better known as a virtuoso pianist and symphonic poem composer whose celebrity status in Europe at the time led to the coining of the term Listzomania – failed to complete his only opera.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Trippet: ‘I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been performed before’ Photograph: Kellie McDonald

“I think it fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons, not least because he had so much else going on,” says Trippett. “But what’s important is that it was born of Liszt’s ambition and that comes across. He proved his capability to write a mature opera and its lyrical style is unmistakably Liszt.”

The musicians of the Staatskapelle, Germany’s oldest orchestra founded in 1491, are well known in the musical world for what critics refer to as a “dark and heavy” sound. They have given a mixed response to the “new” music, based on Byron’s Sardanapalus tragedy about the last king of Assyria.

During rehearsal, some musicians enjoy the work’s ebullience, the dominance of the brass section and the warm and dramatic strains provided by the strings and the flutes. Others look puzzled and vexed, calling on Trippett to answer their questions as he works his way through the score. “It may be 170 years old, but it’s completely new to us,” one violinist says.

Kirill Karabits, the Staatskapelle’s Ukrainian-born music director, insists there is no more fitting place for the music to be performed than Weimar, where Liszt wrote the work, continuing the legacy of many other composers, writers, architects and musicians who gave the city its enduring status as a cultural heritage site. He says: “It belongs here, and he belongs here more than any other composer having shaped cultural life in Weimar.”

Karabits uses the last opportunity before the premiere to carefully fine-tune the performance from his conductor’s stand, attempting to reduce the orchestra’s volume in some places, so that the singers are not struggling to be heard. “The good thing about Liszt is that he lets you get on with it,” he says. “He’s intellectual, but also gives his performers a lot of freedom to react from the stomach. You have to interpret it and be responsible for what comes out, but he wants you to be yourself.”

El-Khoury concurs, saying it has been particularly moving looking at the original score and discovering the ways in which Liszt has tried to communicate with the singers. There are she says, a number of so-called ossias – or alternative versions – he has offered. “That signals to me that he was a singer’s composer,” she says, “giving the singers a choice and trusting them to make the right decision for themselves.”

At the archive where Trippett found the work, Evelyn Liepsch carefully lifts Liszt’s brown leather sketchbook from a blue folder, opening it to show his tiny brown quill etchings, including Italian scribblings, full of spelling mistakes, and the miniature notes clearly applied to the page in a hurry.

The musicologist and Liszt expert says: “It took years for someone to manage to make sense of it. It does make you wonder what other little musical miracles are there waiting to be discovered.”