Sappho, one of the most famous of Greek writers, lived on the island of
Lesbos in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. She has been coaxed into coming
from Hades to visit tonight and will speak and sing to us in English.
Almost all of the Sappho's poetry has come down to us in fragmentary
form. Preserved on tattered papyrus scrolls, many of these scrolls were
torn into strips and pasted together to form cartonage coffins while
other strips have been dug up in ancient rubbish heaps in Egypt and some
were found stuffed into mummified crocodiles. Some poems or parts of
poems were preserved by other writers in manuscripts that have survived.
We know very little about her life and much of what is claimed about her
is disputed. Did she write her work down? Was she a teacher? Are the
women mentioned in her poems her students, or members of a cult, or
lovers, or all of the above? Is Kleis her daughter or a young female sex
slave? Was Sappho homosexual or bisexual, or even heterosexual? Or are
such terms useless when discussing that time and place? Is it better
understood that Sappho was sexually aggressive or assertive with women
and/or men? Does any of that matter? Is her surviving work too
fragmentary to judge? Which works did she compose and which have simply
been ascribed to her? This opera considers our continuing fascination
with her work. Perhaps tonight Sappho will give us answers.
Those interested in the questions can look to a shelf of books including,
Sappho is Burning by Page duBois, and various translations such as those
by Jim Powell, Guy Davenport, and others including the one I use here by
the kind permission of the University of California Press: Mary Barnard's
Sappho: A New Translation. Copyright 1958 The Regents of the University
of California; copyright renewed 1986 Mary Barnard. The Barnard
translation shows what Dudley Fitts called the “pungent downright plain
style” of Sappho's work.
This music was commissioned by, and composed for Beth Griffith. She gave
a preview performance of the work on 17 April 2001 in Raleigh, and the
premiere on 2 April 2002 in New York City at a concert sponsored by the
American Composers Alliance.
Sappho's Breath is the second of a projected trilogy of one-act operas.
The first, Saint Ambrose for saxophonist/actor, recorded electronic
computer music, and projections has been released on Capstone Records,
performed by Steve Duke.
In composing this work I have sought to make a simple, spare, and elegant
setting that corresponds to the directness of the poetry and to my
understanding of the Greek art of the period. The arias were composed
with the help of computer program of my own design based on genetic
algorithms. The title comes from the fragment “only breath, words which I command words which I command are immortal.” (RWII)