Was beklemmt mit sehnlicher Pein so stürmisch Dir die Brust? Wen soll ich ins Netz dir schmeicheln? Welchem Liebling schmelzen den Sinn? Wer wagt es, Deiner zu spotten?
Flieht er: wohl, so soll er dich bald verfolgen; Wehrt er stolz der Gabe, so soll er geben; Liebt er nicht, bald soll er für dich entbrennen, Selbst ein Verschmähter.’
Komm denn, komm auch heute, den Gram zu lösen! Was so heiss mein Busen ersehnt, o lass es Mich empfahn, Holdselige, sei du selbst mir Bundesgenossin!
In 1793, Franz von Kleist at the age of twenty-four had written a tragedy _Sappho_, a typical eighteenth century play of intrigue, an immature performance, however, lacking in clear portrayals of character and in dramatic development. In 1816 F. W. Gubitz had published an unimportant monodrama _Sappho_, which was almost a caricature of what a dramatic work of art should be. In these dramas there was little of the real _Sappho_, but the case is different with Grillparzer’s Sappho, which was given April 21, 1818, in Vienna with great success. Some of the motives of von Kleist reappear in Grillparzer, and there are resemblances in language and thought. He may have used Amalie vom Imhoff’s _Die Schwestern von Lesbos_ (1801), where there is a reference to the Leucadian Leap. But he rises to higher heights, and if he did use the above authors, their “crude ore,” as one critic has expressed it, “yields pure gold.” Grillparzer tells us himself in his autobiography[167] how he conceived the idea of the drama. On June 29, 1817, he was strolling along the banks of the Danube when at the entrance to the Prater, the great park of Vienna, he met Dr. Joël, who remarked that Weigel, the orchestra-leader, wanted a libretto. Dr. Joël stated that Sappho would be a good subject, and Grillparzer immediately replied that it certainly would make a good tragedy. They parted company, and Grillparzer walked deep into the Prater, and when he returned home late in the evening the plan of Sappho was complete. The next day he went to the Imperial Library and secured a copy of the extant fragments of Sappho, in which he found one of the two complete poems, which is addressed to the goddess of love, entirely suited to his purpose. He translated it at once, and the very next morning began work on the drama. The spirit of the play is German, not Greek, and takes some motives from Goethe’s _Tasso_. But Sappho is depicted as a woman rather than a poetess, and the story of the tragedy is really that of an unhappy woman disappointed in love. While it is a genuine love-tragedy, it also portrays the hard lot of the poet and the struggle between art and life even more vigorously than Goethe’s _Tasso_ did. At the very beginning of the play Sappho has been crowned with the wreath of victory at the Olympic games and meets Phaon, who is represented as only slightly younger. Carried away by her triumph, he throws himself into her arms, only to spurn her later. To Phaon she sings (Act I, vi) Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite, which we have just quoted, with a few changes to adapt it to the situation. Of course there were no such contests at Olympia in Sappho’s day, and Sappho’s victory is a pure invention. Neither was the original hymn addressed to Phaon, nor did the usual legend say that Sappho cast herself from a Lesbian cliff; but Grillparzer must preserve the three unities, and such dramatic licenses and many anachronisms, such as the mention of Croesus who lived after Sappho’s time, are permissible to a master of dramatic technique. What interests us is that Grillparzer actually studied Sappho’s fragments and was much assisted by them. In Act I, lines 173 ff., he seems to be referring to the Adonis fragments, including the one on the loneliness of midnight, and to the verses which name Andromeda and Atthis:
