Four Sketches for an Unfulfilled Love

Programme note

Four Sketches for an Unfulfilled Love brings together four settings by two poets of the interwar generation. Beyond their well-known relationship, Kostas Karyotakis and Maria Polydouri share a sense of dissatisfaction, impasse and the pessimism of unfulfilment. They met in 1922, fell deeply in love, and their brief relationship marked their subsequent work. When Karyotakis learned that he had syphilis, then an incurable disease, he asked her to separate. Polydouri proposed marriage without children, but he refused her sacrifice, leading her to believe that the illness was an excuse to leave her. She became engaged a year later but secretly continued to love Karyotakis, gradually moving towards self-destruction: ending her engagement, losing her civil-service job after repeated absences and discontinuing her law studies. In 1928 she contracted tuberculosis. While hospitalised in Athens, she learned of his suicide and sank further into melancholy, until her death in 1930. The four poems were set at different times, orchestrated and recorded in summer 2020. Their conceptual connections formed this small song cycle.