I know this isn't Sappho week, but thought this was a fun find while I was reading some things about dancing and gesture (fishing for a potential topic, hoping something a bit more substantial will bite). In 1851 our good friend Charles Gounod (you may know him from the opera
, you definitely know him from his arrangement of
) composed his first opera: Sapho! Now his librettist misunderstood her poetry and the plot is that she is in love with Phaon (great quote from the article I'm reading on modern receptions of Sappho: "Sappho is a figment of the modern imagination. During her recovery by early modern scholars, she was completely a French fantasy. And throughout the entire span of her modern existence, she has remained largely a projection of the French imagination," Joan DeJean quoted by Samuel Dorf), HOWEVER, even though this was not the first opera to feature Sappho as a character, it was the most popular and is still performed today (don't ask to find any recordings, I haven't found any beyond her
(this is when the virtuous and patriotic Sappho dies) and there is
that I've found. Don't expect a 'historical' Sappho from this opera, expect a French revolutionary figure, and any eroticism comes from other characters (and was censored in the original production but emphasized in the 1884 revival/rewrite, which was also more oriental. The notes, designs, and score changes from this production no longer exist). If I could find any performance of Charles Cuviller's 1912 operetta Sapphô I'd link it too, but there's nothing out there (no surviving score or libretto, it's a ghost). There is also a lost ballet, Sappho von Mitilene, from 1812 (making it before the invention of pointe shoes and pointe technique, so it's not a ballet in the sense we think of ballet today), but we only have part of the score (by Johann Nepomuk Hummel) since it was six acts long and no plot.
Does any of this have a lot to do with the class? Not necessarily, but I thought it was neat 🙂