Abandoned Liszt opera finally brought to life - 170 years later

A great Italian opera by Franz Liszt - which lay incomplete and largely forgotten in a German archive for nearly two centuries - will be given its world premiere this summer after being resurrected by a Cambridge academic. The music that survives is breath-taking. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world - David Trippett David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, first discovered the opera languishing in an archive in Weimar more than ten years ago. A trailer with extracts of the opera being performed can be seen by clicking on the link above. Known only to a handful of Liszt scholars, the manuscript - with much of its music written in shorthand and only one act completed - was assumed to be fragmentary, often illegible and consequently indecipherable. However, after Trippett spent the last two years working critically on the manuscript, a ten-minute preview will now be performed for the first time in public as part of the world-famous BBC Cardiff Singer of the World contest in June. 'In 1849 Liszt began composing an Italian opera, but he abandoned it halfway through and the music he completed has lain silently in an archive for nearly 170 years,' said Trippett.