The Ballad of Mauthausen, often called the Mauthausen Trilogy or Mauthausen Cycle, is a set of four songs that Mikis Theodorakis composed in 1965 to poems by Iakovos Kambanellis, a Greek writer who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen in Austria. Its first song, "Asma Asmaton" (Song of Songs), has become one of the best-known musical memorials to the Holocaust, sung in Greek, Hebrew, German, English, Dutch and other languages.
When Theodorakis died at his home in Athens on 2 September 2021, aged 96, many obituaries singled out this short cycle as perhaps his most moving work. Here is how it came about, what the four songs tell, why the music sounds the way it does, and how the cycle travelled from an Athens theatre to the grounds of the camp itself.
The poet who survived Mauthausen
Iakovos Kambanellis (1921–2011), later one of Greece's leading playwrights, was arrested during the German occupation and sent to Mauthausen, a camp complex near Linz where well over 100,000 prisoners died. After the camp was liberated by American troops in May 1945, he began writing down what he had witnessed. The manuscript sat unpublished for years; it finally appeared as the book Mauthausen, published by Themelio in Athens in December 1965.
Kambanellis also wrote four poems based on episodes from the book. Mimis Despotides, the owner of Themelio, suggested setting them to music and proposed Theodorakis. The choice made sense: the composer had himself been imprisoned during the war by the occupying forces in Greece, and had been tortured and exiled during the civil war that followed, including on the prison island of Makronisos.
What the four songs tell
The cycle follows a young Greek prisoner and the Jewish girl he loves, a story drawn from Kambanellis's own feelings for a Lithuanian-Jewish woman he met in the camp. The four songs are:
- Asma Asmaton (Song of Songs): the prisoner describes his beloved, echoing the biblical Song of Songs, and asks whether anyone has seen her. The tenderness of the words makes the reality of the camp all the more shocking.
- Antonis: a portrait of a fellow prisoner and the brutality of forced labour.
- Drapetis (The Runaway): an escape attempt and the recapture of the escapee by the SS.
- Otan teleiosi o polemos (When the War Ends): the prisoner imagines meeting his love again after the war, a reunion that remains a fantasy.
Together the songs last only about a quarter of an hour, yet they move from love to violence to longing in a way that feels like a complete life story.
Why the music sounds the way it does
Theodorakis wrote the cycle for a single female voice with a small ensemble, close in spirit to the popular song cycles he was writing in the 1960s, such as Axion Esti. The original singer was the young Maria Farantouri, whose dark, steady contralto became inseparable from the work.
Listeners often notice a liturgical quality in "Asma Asmaton". In 1994 the Baltimore Sun critic Stephen Wigler suggested that Theodorakis had borrowed melodic elements from a Greek Orthodox hymn for Palm Sunday. That is the critic's reading rather than something the composer documented, but it helps explain why the song can sound like a prayer.
Writers on Holocaust music have been generous with praise. Jerry Silverman, in his anthology The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, called "Asma Asmaton" "extraordinarily moving". The psychoanalyst Sophia Richman, in Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma, described the cycle as "a requiem for Holocaust victims" and argued that it pushed Greek listeners to ask what had happened to their own Jewish neighbours. More than 80 percent of Greece's Jews were murdered during the occupation, and for decades the subject was rarely discussed in public.
Banned at home, sung abroad
The cycle premiered in December 1965 at a theatre on Hippocrates Street in Athens. Less than two years later, on 21 April 1967, a group of colonels seized power in Greece. Theodorakis went into hiding and called for resistance; on 1 June the junta issued Army Order No. 13, which banned playing or even listening to his music, and on 21 August he was arrested. He spent months in prison, was later confined to the mountain village of Zatouna and the Oropos camp, and was allowed to leave for Paris in April 1970 after an international campaign.
While his music was silenced at home, the Mauthausen songs travelled. They were performed in London in 1967. That same year, at Theodorakis's request, the Dutch singer Liesbeth List recorded them in Dutch on an album that went platinum. Versions in German, English and Hebrew followed, and the cycle became especially loved in Israel, where Kambanellis's "Song of Songs" poem has appeared in school readers.
Performances at the camp itself
In May 1988 Theodorakis conducted what was billed as the world premiere at Mauthausen, in the presence of the Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitzky, Kambanellis and a large crowd. The cycle was sung in four languages: Greek by Maria Farantouri, Hebrew by Elinoar Moav Veniadis, German by Gisela May and English by Nadja Weinberg.
On 7 May 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the camp's liberation, he conducted it there again with Farantouri; the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, himself a Mauthausen survivor, spoke at the concert. A live recording of that evening is the best-known version today. In 1994 Farantouri had sung it at Carnegie Hall in New York, where the audience reportedly joined in. The ballad was played again at the Greek memorial at Mauthausen in May 2015, for the 70th anniversary.
1.
— Άξιος Εστί* (@Axios_Esti) January 27, 2021
"Song of songs" in #Hebrew (1973)
🎼 🇬🇷 #MíkisTheodorákis,
🖋️ 🇬🇷 I. Kampanellis,
🎤 🇮🇱 L.Yeini.
Scenes in the video are from the 🎞️ "Night will fall" 👉 2.#HolocaustMemorialDay #HolocaustRemembranceDay #WeRemember #Άουσβιτς #Holocaust #Auschwitzhttps://t.co/VXPhIKtSeQ
(This post is no longer available on X.)
The post above, shared for Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2021, featured a 1973 Hebrew recording of "Song of Songs" set to scenes from Night Will Fall, the 2014 documentary about the filming of the liberated camps. It has since been removed from X.
Where to start listening
- Maria Farantouri, Mauthausen 1995: the definitive live performance, conducted by the composer.
- The original 1960s Greek recording: closer to the intimate scale of the first premiere.
- The Hebrew version: for many Israeli listeners this is the song itself, not a translation.
- Liesbeth List's Dutch recording: a reminder of how far the songs spread while banned in Greece.
Theodorakis wrote film scores that made him world-famous, from Zorba the Greek to Z and Serpico, and large works such as Canto General to Pablo Neruda's poetry. Yet these four short songs may be the music of his that reaches people most directly, because they ask listeners to remember the dead as individuals who loved and hoped, not just as numbers.
Sources: Wikipedia: Mauthausen Trilogy; Wikipedia: Mikis Theodorakis; Greek Reporter, 2 September 2021. Quoted works: Jerry Silverman, The Undying Flame; Sophia Richman, Mended by the Muse.
COMMENTS