(Digital photo: © Guy Wagner) Mikis Theodorakis occupies an unusual position both in Greek music and in western European music. On the one hand he has been a self-conscious populist who has succeeded in his mission of composing “Music for the Masses.”[i] On the other, he has, like all great artists, lived a life of isolation, an outsider in his own society. As Harold Rosenberg once wrote (1977: 83-4): the artist is a member of a cultural minority because of the fact that he is an artist. Like other artists, he tends to drift into ghettos and is troubled throughout his life by problems of assimilation. On the one hand he is moved to end his segregation and reconcile himself to the ways of life of the majority; on the other, he is aware that the qualities that make him what he is are contingent on his separated state. For the artist, mingling with his fellow men must be weighed against the depletion of his personal identity.Between 1988 and 1998 Theodorakis composed three operas based on classical Greek tragedy. They are, in many ways, a summation of his life’s work, which has always concentrated on the human voice, and almost always on Greek themes. It is not always easy to classify Theodorakis’s compositions as popular or classical and he himself has resisted such categorization, but the fact remains that he is known, particularly in his own country, for his popular songs, whereas his symphonic, instrumental and “metasymphonic” works remain known only to a small audience. There was a moment, in the mid 1960’s, when Theodorakis was at the height of his popularity, when he could claim to have molded Greek musical tastes, leading large audiences to listen to almost anything he wrote, but once that moment passed he was forced to choose between courting a popular audience and writing what interested him. The result was that he spent the 1980’s isolated from the musical currents around him, composing a series of symphonic and choral works. His decision to compose opera might be seen as a continuation of his classical phase of composition; indeed the operas are as demanding as any of his classical works, but I believe they may have a broader appeal. To a Greek audience, the musical language of the operas alternates between the familiar and unfamiliar, with melodic echoes of Theodorakis’s own earlier works as well as Greek folk and Orthodox liturgical material. More importantly, in all three operas Theodorakis has stressed the parallels between ancient and modern Greece, a resemblance Greeks have always been happy to exploit. As I will make clear in my analysis of the operas, both the musical settings and the librettos emphasize the continuity of ancient and modern Greek culture, but they do so in a way that is both original and non-chauvinist. To a non-Greek audience, the familiarity of the tragedies themselves combined with their melodically and rhythmically exciting scores, offers at least the possibility that these operas, rather than his orchestral works, will ensure that Theodorakis becomes known as something more than the composer of the film score for Zorba the Greek. In our times, opera is an elite art form. Expensive to stage and musically demanding, it relies on wealthy patrons for its support. It is also a conventional western art form that is expected to be as accessible to Berliners as it is to New Yorkers. Whatever the Greek audience may pick up in terms of musical self reference or melodic and rhythmic patterns that have local cultural associations, whatever is lost to a European or American audience, an opera must stand on its own musical merit if it is to form part of the repertory of contemporary classical music. The idea that opera might be “music for the masses” is not only far-fetched but undesirable to the average opera buff who thinks of himself as belonging to a cultured minority. There are exceptions to these truisms, like Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which hovers on the border between opera and musical, but the composer who wants to write opera for a broader audience is more likely, in this country, to take one step further than Gershwin and create a true Broadway musical. The problem is that it isn’t easy, having become a popular composer, to be taken seriously in a world where the popular is opposed to the classical and the classical has superior cultural clout. The figure who occupies a somewhat similar position in American music to Theodorakis is Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein, too, was educated in the world of classical music but longed to write a truly American musical, and chose a contemporary translation of a mythical tragedy. The success of West Side Story overshadowed the remainder of his musical career and may have prevented him from becoming the “serious” composer he wanted to be. When Bernstein drew on popular tradition in his work, however, that tradition had already become international. Not only was he writing for a large American population, but jazz and other styles of American popular music had become part of the global musical tradition. Writing on the extreme margin of Europe, could Theodorakis hope to attract an international audience for his popular works? The success of the score of Zorba suggest that there was a broad audience for Greek music, but his film scores were the compositions Theodorakis cared least about. He had always been a serious composer with a mission to break down the distinctions between so-called “classical” and “popular” music. His songs had been inspired by poetry, most of it Greek, although he had set Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Brendan Behan, Paul Eluard and others to music too.[ii] In a country where there was a long and rich tradition of poetry as well as of monophonic folk and ecclesiastical music, it was natural that a composer should be inspired to combine both. But like all those members of the middle and upper classes who studied music in Greece, Theodorakis was educated in classical Western classical music as the foundation of an international language of “high” culture. In Paris he became frustrated by the sterility of contemporary classical composition, but he also became fluent in its language. On his return to Greece he turned his back on many aspects of the new music, using popular singers and instruments to interpret his compositions, but he remained committed to the harmonic principles of western music. He never thought of himself as a popular Greek song-writer, rather as a one who could use elements of the rich popular tradition and combine it with his love of classical music and poetry. The result was that he created a unique synthesis of “high” and “low” art. Some of Theodorakis’s enormous success in the seven years that preceded the 1967 coup d’etat, and in the seven years of military dictatorship that followed, was due to the particular political moment he lived through and to his standing as a cultural and political leader. Both these factors enabled him to attract a larger audience for his more ambitious works than he might otherwise might have done. But the very popularity that bordered on idolatry for many Greeks may have also made it more difficult, once that moment had passed, for Theodorakis to be taken seriously as a classical composer in his own country as well as outside it. When Theodorakis left Greece in 1954 to study composition at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen, he already committed himself to a life of political involvement. He had fought in the resistance to the Germans and in the Civil War that followed; he had been tortured and imprisoned for his Leftist ideals. In Paris, he was excited by the contemporary music being written around him, but as a composer to whom melody was the ultimate element of music, he was also frustrated. His friend and fellow-composer Yiannis Xenakis was delighted by the possibilities of combining mathematical techniques with music, but Theodorakis had none of Xenakis’s mathematical training, and he realized that the audience for such music was very limited. It was the reception of his ballet suite Antigone, first performed at Covent Garden in 1959, which made him aware that audiences still responded to the beauty of a pure melodic line. In part the ballet was an attempt to employ the latest techniques of composition, but the opening chorus of the suite is based on elements of Byzantine chant, transformed into a smooth melodic line supported by simple harmonies. When the ballet was performed, Theodorakis observed that the audience was only truly engaged at this point of the music. It confirmed his feeling that: “In this art [of melody], my own true self was to be found. It was then that I realized my path was to return to the roots.” (1966) Theodorakis’s decision to write melodic, accessible music meant turning his back on what looked to be a promising career as a classical composer. Returning to his roots meant going back to Greece and refashioning himself as a writer of popular songs. What is remarkable is that this decision did not lead to bathos. Despite the rhetoric of his manifestos on popular music and culture, Theodorakis managed to compose “Music for the Masses” without compromising his musical gifts. Between his Antigone his return to classical composition in the 1980’s and 90’s, Theodorakis created the music for which he is best known Greece. Beginning with his song-cycle based on Yiannis Ritsos’s long poem, Epitaphios, he set almost every major Greek poet to music and wrote literally hundreds of songs, many of which are familiar to a generation of Greeks. Not content with writing songs, he began to compose more ambitious works where he mixed popular song with elements of classical and ecclesiastical music. His “popular oratorio” Axion Esti, a setting of Odysseas Elytis’s long poem, is in many ways, a forerunner of the operas Theodorakis would compose in his seventies. Theodorakis’s political involvement and personal charisma, his great gifts as melodist, and the dramatic events of modern Greek history combined to turn him into an almost mythic figure. At the height of his popularity, from the early 1960’s through the military dictatorship of 1967-74 and the immediate aftermath, Theodorakis conducted his music in football stadiums and concert halls around the world. He was feted by world leaders and adored by thousands, perhaps millions of Greeks and non-Greeks. Then came the inevitable reaction. In his own country he began to lose his audience. Young Greeks were listening to different music, to rock and jazz and to Greek song-writers who flavored their songs with elements borrowed from international popular music. Having set himself the task of reaching as broad an audience as possible, Theodorakis made some effort to accommodate to the new tastes of Greek youth, using popular singers, electric basses and rock drummers to interpret his works, but his music lost ground to younger composers, and he felt himself isolated as an artist. By 1980 Theodorakis had made an important decision -- to distance himself again from the world of popular music and return to classical composition. During a fertile new period of composition, he added new sections to his setting of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, and composed his Second, Third, Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, as well as his cantata Kata Saddoukaion Pathi. He also composed a large ballet suite incorporating his Greek Carnival Suite of 1953 and some themes from the film music for Zorba the Greek. The Zorba ballet was performed in the ancient arena at Verona in August, 1988. On the opening night, as he conducted the orchestra, Theodorakis was proud to see his name hanging on a banner beside the giants of Italian opera. After the triumphant success of the ballet and a few glasses of wine, he made a promise to the director of the Verona festival. “I will compose three operas,” he said. “One for Verdi, one for Puccini and one for Bellini.” (1995) For a composer approaching seventy who had never composed an opera, the likelihood of this promise being fulfilled may have seemed remote to the Italian director, but it was neither a vain gesture nor a revolutionary step for a man who had always composed for the human voice as well as for orchestra, and who had been writing music for theater, ballet and film for almost forty years. Between 1984 and 1986, Theodorakis had, in fact, already composed Kostas Karyotakis or The Metamorphoses of Dionysos, a work that he described as an opera buffo based on the life and death of the eponymous poet and inspired by his disgust at the corruption of the PASOK government. Now he set about composing what he saw as the logical extension and culmination of his life’s work: a trilogy of operas based on ancient Greek tragedy. Theodorakis’s interest in ancient drama and myth had found musical expression first in 1946, with the symphonic poem Prometheus Bound, followed two years later by the Oedipus Tyrannus for string orchestra. He had also published two articles (1959, 1960) about the relationship between ancient drama and the modern Greek interpreter, and about the particular problems of setting the choruses of tragedy to music. In the many scores he composed for productions of classical drama staged in Greece, beginning with Euripides’ Phoenician Women (1960), and on through the Ajax (1960-1961), the Trojan Women (1965), Lysistrata (1966-67, Suppliants (1977), Oresteia (1986-880, Knights (1979), Hecuba (1987), Antigone (1990), Prometheus Bound (1992) to the Oedipus Tyrannus (1996) as well as the film scores for Cacoyiannis’s Electra and Trojan Women, Theodorakis continued to explore the relationship between ancient Greek drama and contemporary music. Most of these works remain unrecorded. Composed for a unique occasion, they were never heard again. For Theodorakis they were challenging commissions but he had always longed to do more than set the choral odes of tragedy to music or produce background music for films. He was fascinated by the dramatic and lyric possibilities of composing a full-scale opera.
References Foley, Helene. 2000.
Unpublished talk on Sophocles’ Electra at New York’s Donnell
Library, June 8th.
Notes [i] Mousiki
yia tis mazes (Music for the Masses ) is the title of Theodorakis’s
1972 book about his goals as a composer and his method of composition.
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