The plot is based on a tradition that Sappho, a poet of ancient Greece, threw herself from the high Lesbian cliffs into the sea when she found that her love for the youth Phaon was unrequited, and that he preferred her slave, named Melitta in the play, to her.
Following the success of his first great tragedy of fate, Die Ahnfrau (The Ancestress), which was written in 16 days, Franz Grillparzer wrote this second poetic drama, Sappho, also composed at white heat, and resembling Die Ahnfrau in the general character of its poetry although differing from it in form and spirit.
Its classic spirit is much like that of Goethe's Torquato Tasso; Grillparzer unrolls the tragedy of poetic genius, the renunciation of earthly happiness imposed upon the poet by her higher mission.
Edith J. R. Isaacs evaluates the play in the 1920 edition of Encyclopedia Americana as follows: Grillparzer has made a stirring drama, with an acting quality strong enough to carry it to success on the stage when well performed.
Although the verse has neither the dignity nor the sheer beauty of some of Grillparzer's later work, notably Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (Waves of the Sea and of Love), it has the cumulative quality which often accompanies verse written in long stretches at a single sitting, a quality which does not detract from its distinctly dramatic value.