L'Africaine, Meyerbeer’s last opera, arrived through a lengthy creative process, during which the hero changed from the explorer Fernando da Soto to Vasco da Gama. Much of the opera was written between 1857 and 1863, just prior to the composer's death in 1864.

The opera was finally performed a year later in a version prepared by François-Joseph Fétis a year later, and was a tremendous posthumous success. In its glorious vocal writing, resplendent orchestral colouring and fragrant exoticism, it was a source of delight to many, like Franz Liszt. Even in the midst of his residency in the hallowed grounds of the Vatican in May 1865, he was working at Meyerbeer’s last opera: “L’Africaine was the newest sensation of the theatrical music. The heavy brassy Rococo of its strains, its military ensembles, the number of its figurants, as numerous and diverse as a circus train met with upon the road, these worldly contrasts were such a delight to Liszt that his fantasia upon the opera assumed double form and took up two volumes.”

Here we visit the first of the two rarely encountered fantasies Liszt produced from the opera, the Sailors' Prayer, dedicated to Liszt's friend, the fellow pianist-composer Alfred Jaëll.

Live recording with sheet music.

pf Andrew Wright (alkanliszt)
recorded Reid Hall, Edinburgh University

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