Michael “Mikis” Theodorakis (b. July 29, 1925) is a Greek songwriter and composer who has written over 1000 songs, having scored the films Zorba the Greek (1964), Z (1969), and Serpico (1973), and 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 Theodorakis was born on July 29, 1925, on the Greek island of Chios and spent his childhood years in different provincial Greek cities such as Mytilene, Cephallonia, Patras, Pyrgos, and Tripoli. His father, a lawyer and a civil servant, was from the small village of Kato Galatas on Crete and his mother, Aspasia Poulakis, was from an ethnically Greek family in Çeşme, in what is today Turkey.
Theodorakis 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. In Patras and Pyrgos he took his first music lessons, 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. During the Greek Civil War he was arrested, sent into exile on the island of Icaria, and then deported to the island of Makronisos. During the periods when he was not exiled, he studied from 1943 to 1950 at the Athens Conservatoire under Filoktitis Economidis. In 1950, he finished his studies and took his last two exams. He went to Crete, where he became the head of the Chania Music School and founded his first orchestra. At this time he ended what he has called the first period of his musical writing.
In 1954 Theodorakis travelled with his young wife Myrto Altinoglou to Paris, France, where he entered the Conservatory and studied musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and conducting under Eugene Bigot. His time in Paris, 1954–1959, was his second period of musical writing. His symphonic works include a Piano concerto, his first suite, his first symphony, and his scores for the ballets 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; President of the Jury was Dmitri Shostakovitch. In 1959, after the successful performances of Theodorakis’s ballet 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 – as the “Best European Composer of the Year.” His first international scores for the films Ill Met by Moonlight and Luna de Miel were also very successful. The Honeymoon title song became part of the repertoire of The Beatles.
In 1960, Theodorakis returned to Greece and his roots in genuine Greek music. With his song cycle Epitaphios he started the third period of his composing and contributed to a cultural revolution in his country. His most significant and influential works are based on Greek and world poetry – Epiphania (Giorgos Seferis), Little Kyklades (Odysseas Elytis), Axion Esti (Odysseas Elytis), Mauthausen (Iakovos Kambanellis), Romiossini (Yannis Ritsos), and Romancero Gitano (Federico García Lorca) – he attempted to give back to Greek music a dignity which in his perception it had lost. He developed his concept of “metasymphonic music” (symphonic compositions that go beyond the “classical” status and mix symphonic elements with popular songs, Western symphonic orchestra and Greek popular instruments). He founded the Little Orchestra of Athens and the Musical Society of Piraeus, gave many, many concerts all around Greece and abroad.
During 1964, Theodorakis 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 from old Cretan traditional dances. The “Mauthausen Trilogy” also known as “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” a series of songs with lyrics based on poems written by Greek poet Iakovos Kambanellis, has been described as the “most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust” and as “an exquisite, haunting and passionate melody that moves Kambanellis’ affecting words to an even higher leve.l” It has also been described as possibly Theodorakis’s best work.
After the Regime of the Colonels took power in 1967, Theodorakis was banished in August to Zatouna with his wife Myrto and their two children, Margarita and Yorgos. Later he was allowed to go into exile to Paris on April 13, 1970, but was immediately hospitalized because he suffered from lung tuberculosis. While in exile, Theodorakis fought during four years for the overthrow of the colonels. He started his world tours and gave thousands of concerts on all continents as part of his struggle for the restoration of democracy in Greece. After the fall of the Colonels, Theodorakis returned to Greece on July 24, 1974, to continue his work and his concert tours, both in Greece and abroad.
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 Symphonies, most of them being first performed between 1982 and 1989. It was during this period that he composed his first opera Kostas Kariotakis (The Metamorphoses of Dionysus), 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 (lyric tragedies): Medea (1991), Elektra (1995), and Antigone (1999). This trilogy was complemented by his last opera Lysistrata (2002). With his operas, and with his song cycles from 1974 to 2006, Theodorakis ushered in the period of his Lyrical Life.
For a period of 10 years, Alexia Vassiliou teamed up with Theodorakis and his Popular Orchestra. During that time, and as a tribute to Theodorakis’s body of work, Vassiliou recorded a double album showcasing some of the composer’s most consummate musical creations, and in 1998, Sony BMG released the album entitled Alexia–Mikis Theodorakis. Now he lives in retirement, reading, writing, publishing arrangements of his scores, texts about culture and politics. In 2002 he was honored in Bonn with the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Prize for film music at the International Film Music Biennial in Bonn. In 2005, he was awarded the IMC UNESCO International Music Prize. In 2007, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the distribution of the World Soundtrack Awards in Ghent. A final set of songs entitled: Odysseia was composed by utilizing poetry written by Costas Kartelias for lyrics. In 2009 he composed a Rhapsody for Strings. On December 1, 2010, Theodorakis founded “Spitha: People’s Independent Movement,” a non-political movement which calls people to gather and express their political ideas.
My collection includes the following work by Mikis Theodorakis:
Zorba the Greek (1964): Zorba’s Dance.
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