Biography

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, 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

rakis‘ life is that of a man possessed by music who, notwithstanding the circumstances, has always read and composed music. He completed his composition studies with Filoktitis Ikonomidis in Athens and graduated with distinction. His symphonic and chamber music works have been performed regularly in Greece since the early 1950s and also abroad from 1953. In 1954 he received a scholarship for additional studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen (composition) and Eugène Bigot (conducting) which he completed in 1958. Almost all the chamber and symphonic works written between 1948 and 1960 (including the ballet Greek Carnival, Symphony No. 1 and the First Piano Concerto Helicon) were performed by the National Orchestra of Athens as well as by other major orchestras in Paris, London, Strasbourg and Rome. In 1957 an international jury in Moscow headed by Dmitri Shostakovitch and Hanns Eisler awarded him the First Composition Prize ahead of 240 other composers for his Suite No. 1. In 1958 the French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ hailed Theodorakis as the ‘new Stravinsky’, and Benjamin Britten refered to him in several interviews as one of the most talented new composers of Europe. In 1959, on Darius Milhaud’s recomendation, Theodorakis received the Copley Prize as Best European Composer of the Year. His ballet music finally made the international breakthrough with Les Amants de Teruel (1958) staring Ludmilla Tcherina at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris directed by Raymond Rouleau and also with the undisputed success of Antigone (1959) at Covent Garden, London, with choreography by John Cranko which was staged more than 100 times and became part of the repertoire of the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961.

The world of folk song (1960-1979)

In 1960 Theodorakis apeard to suddenly give up his career as a symphonic composer, moved from Paris to Athens and, for next twenty years, occupied himself exclusively with what he called ‘contemporary folk song’. For Theodorakis, this was at the same time a declaration of his origins: Greece, Crete, the Hellenistic Asia Minor. During this period, he disowned his works written before 1960 which earned him his reputation as a rising star in the realm of classical music, and developed the ‚aesthetics of dialogue‘ which were based on the amalgamation of poetry, song and social commitment. This new aesthetic manifested itself artistically in the composition of numerous songs and large-scale oratorios which developed such momentum that it triggered a cultural revolution in Greece in the early 1960s. In 1967, after the military putsch, Theodorakis‘ music was banned. He was able to put up resistance in illegality for four months, but was then arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Until his deportation to Paris in 1970, the composer again had to endure house arrest, exile and second prison sentence. Shortly after his release, he set out on a worldwide tour with his music to protest against the military dictatorship which only ended with the fall of the junta in 1974. Theodorakis returned to Athens immediately and tried, although without success, to continue the cultural movement of the years before 1967.

Return to symphonic music, discovery of the opera (from 1980)

In 1980 Theodorakis returned to his self-chosen exile in Paris after he again had to live with artistic and political disillusions during and after the time of the junta. This time he returned to symphonic composition, picking up his compositional thread from the period before 1960. He revised a number of his earlier works and wrote several symphonies, choral works and oratorios as well as the operas The Metamorphoses of Dionysos (1984-1986), Medea (1988/90), Electra (1992-93), Antigone (1994-1996), and Lysistrata (2000-01). Within these ‘lyric tragedies’ as the composer calls them, he combined a Greek sound world referring to folksong-like melodies with the Western European music tradition that formed a genre that reflects the composer’s personality, namely that of the melodist and symphonic composer.