History creates more legends than imagination, and artists are nourished by its fruit in a cycle fueled by passions, such as the love and passion that Sappho captured in her work more than 2,000 years ago and that Christina Rosenvinge now recovers in Los Sapphic verses, between pop and folklore, between electronics and the lyre. To talk about Sappho is to talk about Classical Greece, about Aphrodite and Tithonus, about the library of Alexandria and the fury of Pope Gregory VII, who ordered his manuscripts to be burned because he considered them immoral. A whirlwind of centuries in whose heart are hidden sweetly crafted verses that could easily pass for a pop song.
“When I started making the songs I found that I didn’t have to touch Sappho much because her poetry is very concise, with few metaphors, very few flourishes, very simple images that work in a very beautiful way,” Rosenvinge explains in a telephone conversation. , who undertook the project as a continuation of the play Sappho, which he devised for the Mérida festival. The Madrid singer had already faced the challenge of setting poems to music in the past, but she found herself “with too many words, she couldn’t shave those words off the poet.” With Sappho the opposite happens, “even in the complete poems you find a conciseness and a very pure story, if you think about the Passion Poem, it is a pop song that could be by Lana del Rey.”
Rosenvinge recognizes that the work to unite the archaic with the present has been “surprisingly easy”, not in vain lyrical poetry was born sung, “it predates writing, it was expressed orally accompanied by a lyre, that is, it was formally a song.” ”. The fact that Sappho’s work has arrived so fragmented (only 10% of her verses are preserved) has given the Madrid artist extra freedom that is reflected in her songs, where she moves from rock to lieder through electronic, “yes, written in sapphic stanzas”, combinations of hendecasyllabic verses with a pentasyllable tail written in Aeolian Greek that become songs that “could exist in the Spanish songbook”, such as Wedding Song, or in the repertoire of Rosenvinge, case of Light as Air.
As the centuries passed, the figure of Sappho fell into mystery and mythology, “once dead she became a character that was used in operas and stories. “Ovid invented a tragic death for her, a suicide for love of a man, which is a betrayal of her lesbian poetry where it is evident that her love was for women and not men.” The forgetting of her – contrary to what happened with previous works such as the Iliad or the Odyssey – did not manage to bury the fact that in her time the poet from Lesbos was widely imitated, and she established a canon that reached the Roman poets.
It was not until the 19th century that avant-garde poets such as Ezra Pound recovered the work of the Greek, and converted its fragmentation into a positive value. Rosenvinge compares what happened in poetry with Rodin’s incomplete sculptures, which imitated the fragments recovered from the classical period. “In ancient times these torsos were completed because a torso on its own was not considered to have meaning, but Rodin turns it into a motif in itself, the incomplete reaches all its artistic power.” And among the incomplete, Sappho rose from his ashes, “a wonderful revenge that makes her the most modern.”
“I come from a Protestant culture, the education I have received has been more Spartan than Sapphic, more based on sacrifice, duty and austerity than on pleasure and hedonism,” explains Rosenvinge when comparing herself to Sappho, who in her verses sing of desire and non-reproductive sex. “Singing to women’s pleasure remains revolutionary even today. We have started to talk about feminine pleasure very recently”, and when talking about it a link with the sapphic arises, especially in early adolescence, “not only in the question of liquid sexuality, but in the connection with the sensory ”.