The composition is inspired by the work of Sappho of Lesbos, a poetess of ancient Greece, and in particular by her most fragmentary poems. The charm of the incomplete allows us to navigate with our imagination, to imagine meanings and connections that the surviving verses can in some cases subtly suggest, but which often remain shrouded in enigma. The idea of “completing” some of these fragments is the basis of the composition and influences its structure. In fact, the five short pieces that build this work fill, so to speak, the gaps in the lost verses, which are integrated by the performer with the recitation or intonation of the surviving ones, suggesting the enigma that the music has begun to reveal. The pieces range between the different nuances that eros embodies in the Sapphic work, from the most delicate to the most Dionysian. The entire work is unitary and cyclical, as the last piece of the collection integrates, corrodes and distorts some musical fragments and episodes of the previous pieces, permeating them with the feeling of transience and nostalgia that appears in the last verse of Sappho.

Performer: Pietro Elia Barcelona

Erotika (Sappho-Fragmente) for double bass (2024)

Daniele Di Virgilio is an Italian Berlin-based composer and perpetual researcher. Conceiving composition as a multi-disciplinary and social-oriented expression, his music is inspired by a theatrical imagination and by the interest in psychoanalysis.