SKU: BT.EMBZ20017A

English-German-Hungarian.

In 1845 Franz Liszt embarked on a project to compose an Italian opera based on Lord Byron’s tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821). It was central to his ambition to attain status as a major European composer, with premieres variously planned for Milan, Vienna, Paris and London. But he abandoned it half way through, and the music he completed has lain silently for 170 years.
Liszt’s difficulty in obtaining a libretto meant that composition only began in April 1850. He completed virtually all the music for Act 1 in an annotated piano-vocal score of 111 pages, contained within his N4 music ‘sketch book’. The unnamed librettist was an Italian poet and political prisoner, seemingly living under house arrest, and a close acquaintance of Cristina Belgiojoso. His libretto survives as underlay in the N4 sketchbook and has been critically reconstructed and translated.
Sardanapalo is Liszt’s only mature opera. While he consistently referred to it in French, as Sardanapale, the published title of the Italian opera would almost certainly have used the Italian name, hence this forms the title of the first edition. There are three solo roles and a chorus of concubines. The manuscript was previously thought to be fragmentary and partially illegible, but it was finally deciphered to international acclaim in March 2017. Liszt’s score offers a richly melodic style, with elements from Bellini and Verdi alongside glimmers of Wagner and the symphonic poems ahead: a unique mixture of Italianate pastiche and mid-century harmonic innovation. It remains quintessentially Lisztian. The opera sets Byron’s tragedy about war and peace in ancient Assyria: the last King, effeminate in his tastes, is drawn to wine, concubines and feasts more than politics and war: his subjects find him dishonourable (a ‘man queen’) and military rebels seek to overthrow him, but are pardoned, for the King rejects the ‘deceit of glory’ built on others’ suffering: this leads only to a larger uprising, the Euphrates floods its banks, destroying the castle’s main defensive wall, and defeat is inevitable: the King sends his family away and orders that he be burned alive with his lover, amid scents and spices in a grand inferno. As Byron put it: ‘not a mere pillar formed of cloud and flame, but a light to lessen ages.’ For his part, Liszt told a friend that his finale ‘will even aim to set fire to the entire audience!’
This critical edition includes a detailed study on the genesis of Liszt’s Sardanapalo in English, German, and Hungarian, the libretto in the original Italian as well as in English, German, and Hungarian translation, several facsimile pages of Liszt’s manuscript, and a detailed Critical Report.

SKU: HL.50603593

ISBN 9788881920709. UPC: 840126945102. 8.0x10.5x1.3 inches. Italian-English.

Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia was premiered at Milan's Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1833 and is considered one of the composer's most important and innovative operas of the 1830s. Although, because of censorship issues, particularly in the south of Italy, it was initially slow to become popular, by the late 1830s it had become one of the composer's most popular operas, both in Italy and abroad, and remained an essential part of the composer's oeuvre until at least the end of the nineteenth century. Remarkable for its daring subject matter (with an unconventional, forceful heroine), it is also renowned for its challenging mixture of the comic and the tragic, something very unusual at the time and clearly an important influence on Giuseppe Verdi's middle period masterpieces. The present reduction for voice and piano derives from the critical edition of the score, recently published in this catalog: is based on Donizetti's autograph manuscript (housed in the Ricordi Archives in Milan), on the libretto for the premiere, on several printed editions of voice and piano, and on numerous additional scores of the period. It presents for the first time all the numerous additions that the composer made to the score over the course of ten years: a fascinating record of his changing music dramatic attitudes during this period. There is also a synthetic historical reconstruction of the genesis of the opera and of the description of the Sources as well as a selection of most interest to singers of Critical Commentary Notes.

Rappresentata per la prima volta al Teatro alla Scala il 26 dicembre 1833, Lucrezia Borgia e considerata una fra le piu importanti e innovative opere di Donizetti. Sebbene le resistenze della censura, soprattutto nel sud Italia, ne causarono inizialmente una lenta diffusione, dalla fine degli anni '30 dell'Ottocento essa divenne uno dei lavori piu popolari e significativi del compositore e tale rimase fino alla fine del XIX secolo. Notevole per il suo audace soggetto (con un'eroina non convenzionale e dalla forte personalita) essa e rinomata anche per l'impegnativa commistione di comico e tragico, un tratto piuttosto inusuale per l'epoca, che ebbe una chiara influenza sui capolavori verdiani di meta secolo. La presente riduzione per canto e pianoforte e condotta sull'edizione critica della partitura, da poco pubblicata in questo stesso catalogo: si basa sul manoscritto autografo di Donizetti (conservato presso l'Archivio Storico Ricordi di Milano), sul libretto della prima rappresentazione, su alcune riduzioni a stampa per canto e pianoforte e su varie altre fonti dell'epoca. L'edizione presenta per la prima volta tutte le aggiunte che il compositore apporto alla partitura nel corso di dieci anni, costituendo un'affascinante testimonianza dei mutevoli approcci di Donizetti alla materia drammatico musicale durante questa fase della sua carriera. Il volume comprende una sintesi della ricostruzione della genesi storica dell'opera e della descrizione delle fonti e una selezione di Note del Commento Critico fra quelle piu funzionali alle esigenze di cantanti e pianisti accompagnatori.

SKU: HL.49017706

ISBN 9790220127403. UPC: 884088512453. 9.0x12.0x0.161 inches. English.

Composed in 2007 for the Leeds Lieder festival, Hesketh's Shimmerwords and Idle Songs for soprano and piano is a 18 minute song cycle made up of six songs in four sections. The text is taken from a collection of Chinese poetry from the 8th and 9th centuries which cover various subjects from nature and travel to life itself. The music is both colourful and direct with an abundance of humour and clarity.