O ma lyre immortelle (Sapho)

Sapho was Gounod's first opera, staged at the Paris Opéra on 16 April 1851, when he was thirty-two and known mainly as a church musician. Pauline Viardot had pressed the management to accept it and sang the title role; Émile Augier wrote the libretto from the legend of the poet of Lesbos who throws herself from the Leucadian cliff. The run was short and the work never held the stage, though Gounod revised it twice, in 1858 and again in 1884. Its closing scene, a farewell addressed to the lyre, has outlived the opera in recital programmes.