Arcadia
VII: The Survivor - AST 193
by
Gail Holst
What
other composer then Mikis Theodorakis could have written a song
like The Survivor?
It is another of the flow-songs of this period. It has never
been recorded and seldom performed in Greece, but I suspect
it is the most complete statement of his flow-song form, the
logical extension of the perfectly integrated song-cycle which
began with Epitaphios and reached a high point
in the Lorca settings.
When
I heard Maria Farantouri perform The Survivor
at a popular concert in Sydney in 1972, I marvelled that such
a difficult work, a song so far removed from any popular or
traditional prototypes, should have been included in Theodorakis's
programme for a mass audience. It is not surprising that he
should have dropped the song from most subsequent concerts but
that Greek audiences listened intently to it during the dictatorship
was an extraordinary phenomenon.
The
text of Takis Sinopoulos's poem, The Survivor,
struck Theodorakis as a close parallel to his situation at Zatouna:
"What is this place then, what is it?
Scattered pieces of glass
Here and there in the mountains
White and so high
A cry with no voice
And where am I?
Oh, where am I?
Crossing a forest of spiders
Running away all the time
Roaming in a forest of drums
Insisting that my voice be heard
Amidst these times
Falling and falling again
On doors, on windows behind which
These times remain shut up
The examining voice announcing the night
That lives in the bosom of the night..."
From the opening cry of the poem 'Oh, what is this place?'
repeated a semitone higher, the mood of the song is grim and
fearful. Familiar devices of Byzantine melody are used to highlight
dramatic phrases. The lines:
"Listening to the murmur
And the Imperial order
I am listening to the obstinacy. Boasting."
are
illustrated with an extravagant piece of word-painting…
In judging the works of a classical composer, the immediate
success of a piece of music with the public is generally considered
to be irrelevant. History, it is believed, filters out the lesser
composers, and in its light we view with indulgent surprise
Mozart's attempts to win favour with the Viennese opera audience
by including a ball scene in Don Giovanni.
But
who will look at the scores of Theodorakis's Survivor
or the equally neglected Raven, a setting of
Seferis that Theodorakis composed on hearing of the death of
the young composer Yannis Christou?
Like most of his works they exist only in a simple vocal score
and their interpretation is based partly on the musical conventions
of the Greece of his day. Without the voice of Farantouri, without
a knowledge of the extraordinary atmosphere of the period, without
a living tradition of Greek music, will it be like trying to
read a score of the Sikelios fragment?
It seems as if Theodorakis himself had reached the end of a
certain path of development with The Survivor.
©
Gail Holst: Theodorakis. Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music.
Hakkert, 1980
Origins of "O Epizon" |
Poem by Takis Sinopolis | Arcadia
I | Arcadia II | Arcadia
III | Arcadia IV | Arcadia
V | Arcadia
VI | Arcadia VIII | Arcadia
X | Home