Conference Agenda

Can examining operatic musical sketches still be valuable? For Roger Parker, “opera is a genre in which the music is inextricably tied to visual, textual and dramatic elements, and should be considered from many, oft-contradictory, vantage points.” Yet for William Rothstein, “interrelating and (perhaps) integrating the various facets of an opera […] is likely to yield richer fruit once intensive analysis of individual domains has been carried out.”

Taking up Rothstein’s perspective, we devote this session to peeking into opera composers’ workshops. We look—through the lens of rare and remarkable musical sketches—into the construction (and sometimes reconstruction) of three Italian operas of the long 19^th century, all of which challenge the formal and harmonic traditions of their cultural inheritance: Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan, Liszt’s Sardanapalo, and Puccini’s Turandot.

Donizetti’s opera might surprise those who are only familiar with his Lucia di Lamermoor: it is unusually continuous, the set pieces integrated seamlessly into the dramatic flow. William Rothstein shows how the source play determined the opera’s unique shape, and how the continuity draft of Act 2, which omits that act’s only aria, suggests long-range connections. The opera uses major-third relations obsessively, both locally and globally.

Liszt’s Sardanapalo, an Italian opera based on Byron’s tragedy Sardanapalus (1821), was left incomplete after a decade of work. Yet, as David Trippett shows, Liszt’s continuous short score for Act 1 demonstrates the modernizing agenda the composer set forth in the Neue Zeitschrift: stylistic hybridity (bel canto structures embedded in through-composed form), virtuosity as drama, and New German, progressive harmonies.

Lastly, newly accessed autograph sketches for Puccini’s unfinished Turandot have allowed Deborah Burton to complete the opera in a “Puccinian” way. This paper reveals how Puccini wanted a self-proclaimed “modern” finale and what that term meant to him in 1924— yet how the overall form balances this progressive aim with traditional solita forma structures. The “new” sketches, some with unpublished text, also deepen the characterizations of the protagonists. Strikingly, Turandot shares with the other two operas a reliance on third-based key relations.

Maria di Rohan, Donizetti’s last opera in Italian, premiered in Vienna in 1843. Donizetti had long sought to set the source play, Un duel sous le cardinal de Richelieu, a spoken drama with songs. When the opportunity arose, he drafted the opera’s three acts in eight days. A continuity draft of act 2 was published in 2005 by Luca Zoppelli. It is the earliest such draft known to exist for any nineteenth-century Italian opera.

As Anselm Gerhard has noted, the opera reflects French dramatic and musical values. There is little florid singing, especially in the original Vienna version. The music is unusually continuous, set pieces integrated seamlessly into the dramatic flow. As the draft of act 2 demonstrates, the act’s only aria, for Chalais, was interpolated into a series of recitatives, the recitative before the aria linking to the recitative after the aria. This reflects the aria’s origin as a soliloquy between two dialogues, both involving Chalais.

Gerhard has remarked on the beginning of the A-major overture: a unison F-natural, sounded four times. In fact, the note F and the F-major triad play a prominent role throughout act 2: they appear in highly marked positions, usually non-tonic and often non-diatonic. The emphasis on F in an A-major context foreshadows the opera’s obsession with major thirds, which saturate the music at multiple levels, often extending into major-third cycles.

When Donizetti expanded the opera for Paris, he added two pieces to act 2, both taken from the play: a cavatina for Gondì, based on one of the play’s interpolated songs; and an extramarital love scene, impossible to stage in Metternich’s Vienna. The cavatina, one of two pieces added for Gondì, adds a comic element that recalls the tragicomic mixture in Lucrezia Borgia of a decade earlier. The love scene, set as a duet cantabile, completes an otherwise abbreviated solita forma, making this part of the act more rather than less conventional.

Zoppelli rightly compares Donizetti’s draft of act 2 to continuity drafts from Verdi’s middle period, of which that for Rigoletto is best known. The parallel with Verdi will be pursued further.

In 1852 Liszt abandoned a particell for Sardanapalo, an Italian opera based on Lord Byron’s tragedy Sardanapalus (1821). He had completed 110 pages of a continuous short score in his N4 notebook, constituting almost the complete first act (55 minutes). With the publication in 2019 of a critical edition (Neue Liszt Ausgabe), this music became available for critical scrutiny for the first time. Divided into four continuous scenes, it offers an unfamiliar treatment of operatic forms and stylistic hybridity, presenting bel canto structures in through-composed form, while Liszt selectively ignores certain literary forms within the libretto, choosing occasionally to compose across literary convention rather than accord with it.

This modernising agenda was explicit: ‘who is to do what Rossini did not attempt?’ It is partly explained in his 13 essays on contemporary opera published in the Neue Zeitschrift during the 1850s, where he indicates a desire to eschew ‘earlier operatic forms’ in pursuit of the simultaneous layering of what he saw as opera’s three historical phrases: depiction of dramatic situations; expression of feeling; portrayal of character. In response, Sardanapalo draws freely on the progressive toolkit soon to be associated with the Neudeutsche Schule, including modulation by tritone, tertiary key relations, augmented harmonies, and closely notated rhythmic recitation. This sits alongside more traditional mid-century compositional habits, raising questions about the work’s stylistic coherence, its status as a Janus-faced opera conceived in the shadow of Lohengrin, and the reasons for its abandonment.

After assessing the unique character of Liszt’s opera, this talk articulates the challenges of deciphering an incomplete manuscript and asks what is at stake when presenting it for performance. As an incomplete work notated after a decade of planning and detailed working out, Sardanapalo problematises the categories of ‘work’, ‘fragment’, ‘completion’, and ‘reconstruction’ (Sallis 2015; Grier 2006). Gaps in accompanimental patterns, the question of orchestration, and the incomplete ending number among the principal challenges, while the work’s international performances (2018-19) and subsequent reception offer insight into shifting attitudes towards incomplete works, the role and responsibilities of the editor, and the options that exist for fragments within a performance-based artform.

Puccini died suddenly in 1924, leaving numerous scribbled musical sketches for the finale of Turandot. They were collected by Ricordi employee Guido Zuccoli (the Archivio Ricordi got 36)—but Zuccoli did not hand over all of them.

Turandot’s plot involves solving riddles, but the final mystery is how the opera should end. I was able to access some autograph sketches Zuccoli retained, not used in any previous completions, and now have been able to create a Puccinian “realization” of the opera using them and other sketches ignored in previous attempts. Solving the riddle involved exploring Puccini’s “mosaic” technique, his understanding of the term “modern,” the use of major-third cycles and deepened characterizations of the protagonists.

The brief sketches constitute “mosaics” ready for tessellation. One of them suggests a humanizing aria for Turandot, with directions to make it “modern”—a concept this paper will explore in dialogue with the work’s traditional underpinnings. (For example, Puccini writes that the finale “must be a grand duet,” referencing the standard 19^th-century operatic solita forma.) In this sketch, referring to an aria from his opera Edgar, Puccini writes “Nel villaggio, but with chords and harmonized differently and modern movements and reprises and surprises, etc.” Thus, I follow Puccini’s “instructions,” modernizing “Nel villaggio” with bitonality and changing meters.

No sketches exist for the “big kiss,” after which Turandot feels destroyed. But in a letter, Puccini suggests it should be a “modern kiss.” Using model composition, I fashion the kiss on one in Puccini’s self-proclaimed “modern opera,” La Fanciulla del West, which uses a reiterated whole-tone motive. Thus, I repeat a previously heard motive over a major-third cycle (another equal division of the octave), adding Turandot-type bitonality.

Another previously unused, texted sketch shows the prince more humanized as well: his aggressive passion abates—perhaps a #MeToo moment?—saying “O my sweet creature! Fragile and tired, I almost no longer dare to caress you!”

How do all these mosaic pieces cohere? I explore large-scale implications of major-third cycle D-F#-Bb, outlining the presence of an overall harmonic plan, not usually associated with Puccini or Italian opera in general.