First published September 3, 2021.
Mikis Theodorakis, Greece's best-known composer, died at his home in Athens on 2 September 2021, at the age of 96. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared three days of national mourning. Thousands of people, including leaders from every Greek party, filed past his coffin in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens before his body was taken by boat overnight to Crete, where he had asked to be buried in Galatas, near Chania, beside his parents and brother.
For many people outside Greece his name means one tune: the dance from Zorba the Greek. Inside Greece he was much more than that. He set the country's great poets to music, was jailed and exiled by the military junta, served in parliament and government, and wrote songs that crowds still sing at protests, weddings and funerals.
Why Greece declared national mourning
National mourning in Greece is reserved for figures whose lives are bound up with the country's modern history, and Theodorakis's was. Born on Chios on 29 July 1925, he grew up through occupation and civil war, took part in the resistance as a young man, and was imprisoned and sent into internal exile in the late 1940s for his left-wing activity.
His music became a shared language across political divides. Although he was best known as a man of the left, he served as a minister of state in the early 1990s in the conservative government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, the father of the prime minister who announced the mourning. That history helps explain why tributes came from every side of Greek politics.
Music against the junta
When a group of colonels seized power on 21 April 1967, Theodorakis went into hiding and called for resistance. He was arrested in August 1967 and jailed for about five months. A military decree banned the playing, and even the listening, of his music. He was later deported to the mountain village of Zatouna and then held at the Oropos camp.
An international campaign, backed by musicians and public figures abroad, secured his release into exile in Paris in April 1970. From there he toured widely, and his concerts became rallying points for opponents of the dictatorship. He returned to Greece in July 1974, after the junta collapsed, to a hero's welcome. Few artists anywhere did as much to keep the world's attention on a country under military rule.
Film scores that travelled the world
Theodorakis's film work made him internationally famous:
- Phaedra (1962), directed by Jules Dassin.
- Zorba the Greek (1964), whose "Zorba's Dance", the syrtaki, became one of the most recognised pieces of Greek music in the world.
- Z (1969), Costa-Gavras's political thriller about the murder of a Greek politician; his score won a BAFTA.
- Serpico (1973), Sidney Lumet's police drama, whose score earned him a Grammy nomination.
Other artists carried his melodies further. "The Honeymoon Song", from the film Honeymoon, entered the Beatles' early repertoire, and Edith Piaf recorded "Les Amants de Teruel" with his music. Greek City Times also lists Shirley Bassey among the international singers who performed his songs. In Greece, singers such as Maria Farantouri became closely associated with his work.
Poetry set to music
Theodorakis's deepest influence in Greece came from bringing serious poetry to a mass audience. He set texts by Odysseas Elytis, Yiannis Ritsos, George Seferis and others to music in a popular style that ordinary listeners could sing. His oratorio Axion Esti (1960), based on Elytis's poem, is still performed to packed audiences.
The Mauthausen Trilogy, also known as The Ballad of Mauthausen, sets poems by Iakovos Kambanellis, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp, and is often counted among his finest works. If you are new to his music, listening to a film theme and then to one of these poem settings, with a translation in hand, shows how much range he had: the words shape the melody, and pauses and repeated lines gain real force in performance.
A long political life
Theodorakis was elected to the Greek parliament several times, first in the 1960s, later for the Communist Party of Greece in the 1980s, and then as an independent within a centre-right alliance in 1989. He served as a minister of state between 1990 and 1992 or 1993 (sources differ on the exact end date). He received the Lenin Peace Prize, and many of his symphonies premiered in East Germany during the 1980s.
He remained outspoken into old age, taking part in demonstrations and commenting on the country's economic crisis in his late eighties. Admirers and critics alike agreed that he never stopped seeing music as a public act.
His positions were not always easy to place on a simple left-right map. He moved between communist and centre-right alliances, defended causes he believed in regardless of who championed them, and often criticised former allies. For many Greeks that independence was part of his appeal: he was trusted less as a party man than as a voice of conscience who had paid for his beliefs with prison and exile.
The farewell in Crete
The final journey to Crete reflected that family history. His father's roots were in Galatas, a village just west of Chania, and Theodorakis had asked to rest there with his parents and brother. A village graveside, far from the capital's concert halls, was a fitting resting place for a composer whose melodies had long belonged to ordinary people singing them together rather than only to performers on a stage.
Where to start listening
- "Zorba's Dance" for the famous slow-to-fast syrtaki.
- Axion Esti for his ambition as a composer of large-scale works.
- The Ballad of Mauthausen for his most moving settings of poetry.
- The score of Z for the sound of political cinema in the late 1960s.
Recordings vary a great deal, from orchestral versions to small bouzouki-led bands, so it is worth comparing several performances of the same piece. The mourning of September 2021 marked the end of a remarkable life, but the music remains very much alive.
Sources: Wikipedia: Mikis Theodorakis; Greek City Times, September 2021: Mikis Theodorakis to be buried in Crete.
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