I Lie Alone

FOR SATB Unaccompanied (3’30)

Programme Note

Sappho – The Moon is Down (fragment) 
The silver moon is set;

The Pleiades are gone;

Half the long night is spent, and yet

I lie alone.

(Translation by J. H. Merivale, 1883. Referenced in The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sappho, by Henry Thornton Wharton).

This four line fragment, commonly attributed to Sappho, describes a woman alone at night. The text has a distinct sense of immediacy, with its simple but direct imagery; the poem describes a ‘silver moon’ and the visibility of the constellation Pleiades, an important cluster in Greek mythology that symbolized the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. There is a sense of waiting through the long hours of the night, and a melancholic but intimate sensibility. As Odysseus Tsagarakis wrote “the feeling of loneliness is most beautifully expressed by Sappho” in this fragment.

Ghostly, dissonant harmony evoking an image of the ‘silver moon’ emerges at the opening, increasing in density and rhythmic intensity. The observation of the constellation Pleiades being ‘gone’ from the night sky is explored through a kind of melancholic polyphony, before a development of the close, cluster harmony of the opening returns for the poem’s final, mournful line ‘I lie alone’. The woman’s drifting thoughts continue into the night, through eerie, mysterious humming at the very end.

*World premiere performance given  by the Marian Consort at Music at Malling Festival, West Malling on Friday 26th September 2025.