It was first performed on 27 November 1897 by the Opéra Comique at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Place du Châtelet in Paris with Emma Calvé as Fanny Legrand.

A charming and effective piece, the success of which is highly dependent on the charisma of its lead soprano, it has never earned a place in the standard operatic repertory.

[1] In its first production in 1897 Sapho was presented in a heavily truncated form of four tableaux, due to the limited availability of Calvé, as well as the approaching death of Daudet (who was a close friend of Massenet), and the acting deficiencies of the tenor Leprestre, who was playing the romantic lead role of Jean Gaussin.

Harold C. Schonberg, writing in The New York Times, commented: It was fun to hear this dated piece, but the chances are that not many impresarios will be rushing to revive it.

He well knew how to tickle his audience, and could be outrageously sentimental – as he is in the last act of "Sapho," with the solo violin weeping away in the famous Massenet kind of treacle.

"Sapho" is a collation, with its quotes (deliberate) from other operas, its touch of folk music, its in-and-out dances, its opportunities for vocal and histrionic display.

[11] A fancy ball at Caoudal's studio Jean Gaussin is a shy and unsophisticated young man from Provence, who has come to Paris to study.

At a costume ball given by the sculptor Caoudal, amid the noisy dance music and the mad whirl, the confused Gaussin withdraws and sings of his native country, in a broad and expressive cantabile, one of the few aria-like passages that the opera contains.

Fanny, whose fancy is captured by this young man, so strangely different from her friends, promptly makes his acquaintance, and, as the guests are shouting for her to come to supper, takes him away with her.

Other than this song and a fragment of his aria from the first act, all is conversation in music, rapid and free declamation over a continually varied orchestral accompaniment.

By a chance word from Caoudal, Jean learns for the first time that his adored Fanny is none other than Sapho, the notorious model, and he is told something of her past.

In 1903 the composer accompanied (on the piano) Georgette Leblanc on wax cylinder in an extract "Pendant un an je fus ta femme" from the opera.

A studio recording (released on LP in 1978 by EMI/Pathé Marconi and distributed in the US under the Peters International label; now available on CD) stars Renée Doria as Sapho.