Mikis Theodorakis
Michail "Mikis" Theodorakis was a Greek composer and lyricist credited with over 1,000 works.
He scored for the films Zorba the Greek, Z, and Serpico. He was a three-time BAFTA nominee, winning for Z. For the score in Serpico, he earned Grammy nominations. Furthermore, for the score to Zorba the Greek, with its song "Zorba's Dance", he was nominated for a Golden Globe.
He composed the "Mauthausen Trilogy", also known as "The Ballad of Mauthausen", which has been described as the "most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust" and possibly his best work. Up until his death, he was viewed as Greece's best-known living composer. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.
Politically, he was associated with the left because of his long-standing ties to the Communist Party of Greece. He was an MP for the KKE from 1981 to 1990. Despite this, however, he ran as an independent candidate within the centre-right New Democracy party in 1989, for the country to emerge from the political crisis created by the numerous scandals of the government of Andreas Papandreou. He helped establish a large coalition between conservatives, socialists and leftists. In 1990, he was elected to the parliament, became a government minister under Konstantinos Mitsotakis, and fought against drugs and terrorism and in favor of culture and education. He continued to speak out in favour of leftist causes, Greek–Turkish–Cypriot relations, and against the War in Iraq. He was a key voice against the 1967–1974 Greek junta, which imprisoned him and banned his songs.
Early life
Theodorakis was born on the Greek island of Chios and spent his childhood years in provincial Greek cities including Mytilene, Cephallonia, Patras, Pyrgos, and Tripoli. His father, a lawyer and a civil servant, was from the small village of Galatas on Crete and his mother, Aspasia Poulakis, was from an ethnically Greek family in Çeşme, in what is now Turkey. He was raised with Greek folk music and was influenced by Byzantine liturgy; as a child he had already talked about becoming a composer.His fascination with music began in early childhood; he taught himself to write his first songs without access to musical instruments. He took his first music lessons in Patras and Pyrgos, where he was a childhood friend of George Pavlopoulos, and in Tripoli, Peloponnese, he gave his first concert at the age of seventeen. He went to Athens in 1943, and became a member of a Reserve Unit of ELAS. He led a troop in the fight against the British and the Greek right in the Dekemvriana. During the Greek Civil War he was arrested, sent into exile on the island of Icaria and then deported to the island of Makronisos, where he was tortured and twice buried alive.
During the periods when he was not obliged to hide, not exiled or jailed, he studied from 1943 to 1950 at the Athens Conservatoire under. In 1950, he finished his studies and took his last two exams "with flying colours". He went to Crete, where he became the "head of the Chania Music School" and founded his first orchestra.
Studies in Paris
In 1953, Theodorakis married Myrto Altinoglou. The following year, they travelled to Paris, where he entered the Conservatory and studied musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and conducting under Eugene Bigot.His symphonic works: a Piano concerto, his first suite, his first symphony, and his scores for the ballet: Greek Carnival, Le Feu aux Poudres, Les Amants de Teruel, received international acclaim. In 1957, he won the Gold Medal in the Moscow Music Festival. In 1959, after the successful performances of Theodorakis's opera Antigone at Covent Garden in London, the French composer Darius Milhaud proposed him for the American Copley Music Prize – an award of the "William and Noma Copley Foundation", which later changed its name to "Cassandra Foundation" as the "Best European Composer of the Year". His first international scores for the film Ill Met by Moonlight and Honeymoon, directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, were successful: The Honeymoon Song, title song of the later, became part of the repertoire of The Beatles.
Back to Greek roots
In 1960, Theodorakis returned to Greece and his roots in Greek music. With his song cycle Epitaphios, he contributed to a cultural revolution in his country. His most significant and influential works are based on Greek and world poetry – Epiphania, Little Kyklades, Axion Esti, Mauthausen, Romiossini, and Romancero Gitano – he attempted to give back to Greek music a dignity which in his perception it had lost. He developed his concept of "metasymphonic music".He founded the Athens Little Symphony Orchestra and gave many concerts in the country, trying to familiarize people with symphonic music.
After the assassination of Gregoris Lambrakis in May 1963 he founded the Lambrakis Democratic Youth and was elected its president. Under Theodorakis's impetus, it started a vast cultural renaissance movement and became the greatest political organisation in Greece with more than 50,000 members. Following the 1964 elections, Theodorakis became a member of the Greek Parliament, associated with the left-wing party EDA. Because of his political ideas, the composer was black-listed by the cultural establishment; at the time of his biggest artistic glory, a large number of his songs were censored-before-studio or were not allowed on the radio stations.
During 1964, he wrote the music for the Michael Cacoyiannis film Zorba the Greek, whose main theme, since then, exists as a trademark for Greece. It is also known as "Syrtaki dance", inspired by old Cretan traditional dances.
During the dictatorship
On 21 April 1967 the Regime of the Colonels took power in a putsch. Theodorakis was a symbol of resistance to the military regime. He went into hiding, issued the first call for resistance against the dictatorship on 23 April. and founded the . On 1 June, the Colonels published "Army decree No 13", which banned playing, and even listening to his music. Theodorakis was arrested on 21 August, and jailed for five months. He was released at the end of January 1968, and then deported in August to Zatouna with his wife, Myrto, and their two children, Margarita and. Later he was interned in the concentration camp of Oropos.An international solidarity movement, headed by such personalities as Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, and Harry Belafonte demanded to get Theodorakis freed. On request of the French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Theodorakis was allowed to go into exile to Paris on 13 April 1970. Theodorakis' flight left secretly from an Onassis-owned private airport outside Athens. He arrived at Le Bourget Airport where he met Costa Gavras, Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin. Theodorakis was immediately hospitalized with tuberculosis. His wife and children joined him a week later in France, having travelled from Greece via Italy on a boat.
He would compose, alongside Pagani, the anthem of the French Socialist Party, in 1977.
Resistance in exile
In 1971, Mikis Theodorakis was invited to Chile by then-president Salvador Allende. In Valparaíso, he listened to a group of young people who introduced him to part of the work of the poet Pablo Neruda. Theodorakis loved it and promised to give Chile his musical opinion on the Canto General. Back to Paris, in 1972 Theodorakis met Pablo Neruda when the Greek composer was rehearsing the musicalization of Canto General. Neruda was impressed and asked him to include poems such as "Lautaro" and "A Emiliano Zapata".He was received by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Tito, Yigal Allon and Yasser Arafat, while François Mitterrand, Olof Palme and Willy Brandt became his friends. For millions of people, Theodorakis was the symbol of resistance against the Greek dictatorship together with Melina Mercouri.
Return to Greece
After the fall of the colonels, Mikis Theodorakis returned to Greece on 24 July 1974 to continue his work and his concert tours, both in Greece and abroad. His return was in triumph, with huge crowds and his music playing on the radio. At the same time he participated in public affairs. In 1978, through his article For a United Left Wing, he had "stirred up the Greek political life. His proposal for the unification of the three parties of the former United Left —which had grown out of the National Liberation Front—had been accepted by the Greek Communist Party which later proposed him as the candidate for mayor of Athens during the 1978 elections." He was later elected several times to the Greek Parliament and for two years, from 1990 to 1992, he was a minister in the government of Constantine Mitsotakis. After his resignation as a member of Greek parliament, he was appointed General Musical Director of the Choir and the two Orchestras of the Hellenic State Radio, which he reorganised and with which he undertook successful concert tours abroad.He was committed to raising international awareness of human rights, environmental issues, and the need for peace. For this reason, he initiated, along with the Turkish author, musician, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli, the Greek–Turkish Friendship Society.
From 1981, Theodorakis had started the fourth period of his musical writing, during which he returned to the symphonic music, while still going on to compose song-cycles. His most significant works written in these years are his Second, Third, Fourth, and Seventh Symphony, most of them being first performed in the former German Democratic Republic between 1982 and 1989. It was during this period that he received the Lenin Peace Prize. He composed his first opera Kostas Kariotakis and the ballet Zorba the Greek, premièred in the Arena of Verona during the Festival Verona 1988. During this period, he also wrote the five volumes of his autobiography: The Ways of the Archangel.
In 1989, he started the fifth period, the last, of his musical writing: He composed three operas Medea, first performed in Bilbao, Elektra, first performed in Luxembourg and Antigone, first performed in Athens Concert Hall. This trilogy was complemented by his last opera Lysistrata, first performed in Athens : a call for peace... With his operas, and with his song cycles from 1974 to 2006, Theodorakis ushered in the period of his Lyrical Life.
In March 1997, gave a concert at the Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Afterwards he was hospitalized due to respiratory difficulties and it was when he declared that this was his last concert.
Theodorakis was Doctor honoris causa of several universities.
File:Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and George Papandreou, Greece May 2010 5.jpg|thumb|Theodorakis holding hands with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou