ABSTRACT
Despite the scanty and rather mythical biographical evidence on the ancient Greek poet Sappho, today she reemerges as a realized figure of hope and desire for humanity. Through a constellation of surviving papyri fragments, what emerges to us is not a voice dominated by poetic conventions of thematic unity and prosody, but rather a poetess that talks, laughs, and even insults. The song cycle ὁδοιπορία (the journey) by American composer/pianist/teacher Paul Tuntland Sánchez consists of six musical settings of several Sapphic fragments based on renderings by American poet and playwright Sherod Santos. Mr. Santos’s lucid English translations reflect a key aesthetic of lyric of the archaic Greek period, that is, a “preference for the live and mutable nature of spoken word over the fixed, inalterable nature of the written.” The musical and textual narrative that Sánchez constructs with these selected translations reveals a lyric musical subject that speaks of a specific kind of Sapphic desire and hope that transcends the boundaries of time. This chapter aims to explicate the final song, For Atthis, from tracing how the use of thematic prolongation and textual space leads to the song’s catharsis, ultimately noting specifically how the emerging lyric subject has allowed Sánchez to essentially recompose the figure of Sappho in order to complete this journey.
