Four Songs on Poems by Sappho for solo voice and orchestra

Abstract

Four Songs on Poems by Sappho was composed in 1968 and orchestrated in 1971. The English translation of the poems was rendered by Professor Willis Barnstone, professor of comparative literature and Spanish at Indiana University, and noted classical scholar and author.

The poetess, Sappho, was born on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century. She is considered by many as the greatest lyric poet of antiquity, writing with clinical objectivity on the passion of love, and with intimate and colloquial conversational style about nature and her friends. Most of her poems survive only in fragments in the works of Latin and Greek scholars.