Biography · Biographie Music and Nothing but Music… The development and career of Mikis Theodorakis Mikis Theodorakis is possibly the one contemporary composer in the world with an audience larger and more wide-ranging than anyone else, a unique phenomenon in the musical life of our time. His popularity is mainly due to two factors, his extraordinary talent for melody and the sheer extent of his musical output. His oeuvre comprises not only of around 1000 songs but of also more than 100 major compositions including chamber, ballet, theatre and film music as well as symphonies, concerti and operas which have been performed by internationally renowned conductors such as Thomas Beecham, Dimitris Chorafas, Charles Dutoit, Herbert Kegel, Dimitri Kitajenko, Zubin Mehta. All these works continue to hold their place within international concert repertoire to this day. Dispite the distinct nationalistic Greek element in his music, characterized by Byantine, demotic and Cretan infludnese, Theodorakis is an extremely cosmopolitan, liberal and outward looking artist both in his music and thinking. Among his favoured writers are international authors such as Federico García Lorca, Brendan Behan, Pablo Neruda and Martin Walser. His diverse oeuvre also comprises of numerous film scores (Honeymoon by Michael Powell, Phaedra by Jules Dassin, Five Miles To Midnight by Anatole Litvak, Zorbas the Greek by Michalis Cacojannis, Z by Costa Gavras, and Serpico by Sidney Lumet) and his songs, which over the past 40 years have been have been sung by performers like Agnes Baltsa, the Beatles, Dalida, Maria Farantouri, Mary Hopkin, Liesbeth List, Maria del Mar Bonet, Marino Marini,
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Milva, Mouloudji, Georges Moustaki, Nana Mouskouri, Edith Piaf, and Herman van Veen. Theodorakis‘ discography extends to around about 300 titles many of which contain solely recordings of his own songs and works. Youtube currently holds over 2,400 video featureing Theodorakis’ music and a Google search for his name yields over 400,000 hits. How did this tremendous popularity of an originally classical composer come about?
Theodorakis 1937
Apprenticeship and rise of a composer (1943-1959) From the early 1940s, all the energies and aspirations of the then fifteen-year-old Mikis Theodorakis were directed toward one goal: to become a composer. Even the experience of war (1941-1944), civil war (1944-1949), imprisonment and exile (repeatedly between 1946 and 1949) and forced recruitment in the early 1950s did not discourage him from his plans. Theodo-
