Peter Seeger and Arthur Miller arranged for him to give a talk at the Manhattan Center on his music and the situation in Greece under the junta. His first visit was sponsored by the United Nations and he visited New York City. He visited the United States twice, in 1971 and in 1994. The Library of Congress holds much of Theodorakis’ musical works and political writing, as well as the many varied critical commentaries they generated. Looking at his life and his work, one gets a deep sense of the profound social and political change that defined Greece over the course of the twentieth century. From the numerous prisons, where he was subjected to severe torture, to the streets, where he protested against the austerity measures imposed after the 2008 financial crisis, Theodorakis put Greece and its people front and center. As recent biographers note, many of his musical concerts were also political events. Thereafter his political energies, like his music, were devoted to Greece. As the son of a civil servant devoted to the charismatic nationalist leader Eleftherios Venizelos, young Mikis inherited a deep love for Greece and thrust himself into politics by joining the antifascist resistance during World War II. Born in wartime, Theodorakis fled the Anatolian coastal city of Izmir (Greek Σμύρνη) for the island of Chios with his parents during the Greek-Turkish War in 1919. For much of his life, Greece was a country in transformation. Theodorakis’ music was deeply influenced by the politics of his times. To understand this veneration is to comprehend the source of his passion. This tendency made him a controversial figure but also Greece’s most beloved composer. Over the years he also used his music to comment on what he saw as popular struggles outside of Greece. From there Theodorakis used his voice to bring attention to Greece’s domestic troubles. Theodorakis’ reputation was so powerful that the military junta, which had imprisoned him in the late 1960s, bent to international pressure to allow him the dignity of seeking medical treatment in exile. This heart-warming irony seems particularly striking when we consider that his music was prohibited at the height of the Greek dictatorship for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Anecdotes of foes and friends who loved his music-from policemen to peasants-are abundant. He wrote operas, symphonies, chamber music, ballets, film scores, hymns, marches, and popular songs. Theodorakis was a prolific composer whose range spanned a variety of classical and popular music genres. The classically trained composer studied at the Athens and Paris Conservatories and made his fame by harnessing Greece’s traditional bouzouki music, played on the eponymous stringed instrument, to write melodies for the common man. The death of the man who wrote the musical score for the internationally acclaimed film “Zorba the Greek” set his countrymen to tears for a three-day national mourning period.Īge 96 at his death, Theodorakis led a long and rich life punctuated by two intertwined passions: his music and his country. One year ago, on September 3, 2021, Greece lost its beloved composer, Mikis Theodorakis. Mikis Theodorakis, interview with the Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1994 In my circumstances, it was impossible to be indifferent.” I wasn’t living in Vienna like Mozart or Beethoven. (The following post is by Nevila Pahumi, Reference Librarian in Modern Greek and Albanian, European Reading Room)
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