At this year's Athens Festival, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis took the podium at the Herod Atticus Theatre to conduct the Mikis Theodorakis Popular Orchestra. Despite taking the baton in front of thousands of orchestras, this was his first time to conduct a popular orchestra at the Herod Atticus, and has prompted a renewed assessment of the 76-year-old composer's work.
"I've directed fragmentarily at the Herod Atticus, but never before a popular laiko unitals concert", he said before the concert. The programme included his Lyrikotata and Lipotaktes, musical adaptations of poetry by his brother, Yiannis Theodorakis; Epitaphios, based on the epic poem by the late Yiannis Ritsos; and The Song of the Dead Brothers, a setting of one of his own poems.
Forty years after he first presented Lipotaktes, Theodorakis says the cycle has now closed. Indeed, many were surprised at the programme. The Athens daily Kathimerini pointed out that through his most recent work, Theodorakis has refrained from commenting on current affairs and feels out of place in the contemporary world. The former cultural icon of the Greek left ended his political career in the last conservative government, but the Athens Festival concert hinted at a return to older political values and campaigns.
Theodorakis was born in 1925 on the island of Chios, six years after Andrea Papandreou, into a family that suffered for its politics. His mother fled Asia Minor along with 1.5 million Greeks in the face of the Turkish onslaught. His father, a civil servant from a village near Hania in Crete, was shifted from island to island because of his radical views.
As an eight-year-old on Kephalonia, Captain Corelli's island, the young Michaelis Theodorakis got his first musical training in the church choir and listening to songs brought from Anatolia by his mother's family. He was writing poems and songs at 17, including The Song of Captain Zacharias, based on a poem by Aristotle Valaoritis.
During the Italian and German occupation he was arrested and tortured before going underground in Athens. There he met his future wife, Myrto Altinoglou, and the director of the Athens Conservatoire, Philokitis Ikonomidis - who took him on as a student. As a partisan, he also came into contact with another future composer, Iannis Xenakis.
As the partisans of the left resisted the post-war political settlement, The Song of Captain Zacharias became a popular protest anthem. Once again, Theodorakis was beaten and tortured; his right eye was left with impaired vision and the tuberculosis he contracted then has continued to dog his health. In 1948, while he was still underground, Theodorakis first met Melina Mercouri and wrote Song of the Dead Brother, a tribute to a friend he had seen tortured and dragged to the firing squad. His First Symphony was later dedicated to two childhood friends who died on opposing sides in the civil war.
Imprisoned at the end of the civil war for refusing conscription, Theodorakis was exiled to Makronissos, where he met the poet Yiannis Ritsos, author of Epitaphios. Once again he was beaten, tortured, left for dead, and buried alive. And yet he graduated from the Athens Conservatoire in 1950. He settled briefly in his father's Crete, and there composed music for two ballets, Orpheus and Eurydice and Greek Carnival, and his first Greek film scores. In 1954, he was allowed to go to Paris to study under Messiaen. International recognition came quickly, and he soon received his first commission for a foreign film, Ill met by Moonlight, based on the war-time resistance in Crete.
But the turning point came in Paris in 1958 when he read Epitaphios by Ritsos, the story of a mother's distress after the murder of her striking son. That year also brought him commissions for three ballets, including Antigone for Margot Fonteyn at Covent Garden, but Epitaphios was about to have a major impact at home. Within months, Epitaphios was recorded in Greece by Manos Hadjidakis, with his own orchestra and Nana Mouskouri. An unhappy Theodorakis promptly returned home, started his own orchestra, and with Grigoris Bithikotsis as soloist produced a recording of Epitaphios based on the popular rembetiko. It was the beginning of a national polemic: Greeks were either pro-Hadjidakis or pro-Theodorakis, and behind the debate there were deep, hidden political conflicts.
Theodorakis formed the Athens Little Symphony Orchestra, and threw himself into politics. With the murder of George Lambrakis in May 1963, Epitaphios became the rallying song of vigils, protests and the funeral in events that inspired Costas Garvas' film, Z. But Theodorakis still found time to write the score for Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek, and enjoyed the premiere of his grand oratorio, Axion Esti, based on the epic by the Cretan Nobel poet Odysseas Elytis.
After the coup in 1967, the colonels banned all his works, along with classical tragedies and the bagpipes. Shostakovitch and Bernstein launched campaigns for his freedom, and on his release Theodorakis embarked on a series of world tours that made him a symbol of Greek resistance.
In 1981, Theodorakis was elected for Piraeus on the tide that brought Papandreou and Pasok to office, and saw Melina Mercouri become Minister of Culture. But he was soon disenchanted and became a minister without a portfolio in the conservative New Democracy government in 1990. It was a disastrous experience, and he has since concentrated on his music, directing choirs and writing operas and ballets (including a new Zorba). He actively promoted peace with neighbouring Turkey and Macedonia at the height of tensions, and now appears to have made his peace with Pasok. His candidature for the Nobel Peace Prize, announced at a concert conducted before the Prime Minister, Costas Simitis, gained all-party support.
Today, Theodorakis is less well known here than in many other European countries. Professor Gail Holst of Cornell, author of Road to Rembetika and Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Greek Music, says he is "a major contemporary composer whose work [deserves] to be compared with Bartok and Stravinsky, Britten and Boulez". Holst, who accompanied Theodorakis on a recent European tour when he presented his operas Electra and Medea, sees him as a "song writer of genius" and says his settings of the leading Greek poets are "among his most memorable achievement". She is convinced his operas will become "part of the repertoire of European classical opera for many years to come".
This year's Athens Festival also paid tribute to his contemporary, Iannis Xenakis, who died earlier this year. Maria Farantouri, the internationally accepted interpreter of Theodorakis, also gave a concert that included a selection of songs by Manos Hadjidakis. If Theodorakis appears to have returned to his political roots, he also appears to be preparing for a reconciliation with the memories of his former rival. He is referring more frequently to Hadjidakis, and during the Athens Festival admitted his death in 1994 "was a huge loss for me". "We shared a deep friendship despite knowing that we were two contrasting figures", he said, adding poignantly that since his death his life had "become empty".
