On October 17, 1825, in Don Sanche c. At the premiere of the opera in Paris, the audience waited with unceasing applause for the composer to take the stage. Finally, a tall, respectable gentleman picked up the composer and carried him in his arms to the celebrating crowd. The tall, dignified Mr. Alfred Nourrit, a celebrated tenor of his time, was also the title character of the opera. And the composer was the 14-year-old Ferenc Liszt, small for his age, who gloomily accepted the success of his first (and also his last) opera, as he was actually bitterly offended that, despite all his limping, Nourrit carried him in front of his audience like a child. The opera had a total of four performances and was not performed for 150 years. Why? First of all: the score is gone. In the autumn of 1873, the Salle le Peletier, the building of the Paris Opera at the time, where the presentation of Don Sanche was also held, burned down. and where the manuscript of the work was kept. Liszt died believing that his only opera had fallen victim to the fire. "Because it was nothing, it became nothing." he told his biographer in 1880.
However, the Salle le Peletier had a conscientious sheet music librarian and a helpful assistant who rescued all scores, documents, books and posters from the fire. Thirty years later, a French musicologist with a passion for hunting scores he thought were lost in music libraries found the score of Don Sanche. So the score was
bypassed, but the new presentation was still waiting...
