“A bad song! Bah! A political song and an sorry song!” This is the sound of fire in Auerbach’s cellar in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “Faust”. For the noble art of the German classical period and the educated bourgeoisie who believed in it, this seemed irreversible. But Robert Schumann has already quoted the “Marseillaise” in the “Faschingsschwank in Vienna”: it may allude to Metternich’s restoration; even if he is not firmly opposed to it. The relationship between music and politics still fluctuates accordingly: autonomy or commitment. The primacy of aesthetics and social conscience, and even “absolute” music and popular, including applications, form a polygon of power that people cannot easily get rid of. The conflict between Schoenberg and his traitor student Hanns Eisler is typical. Hans Werner Henze in 1965 and Luigi Nono in the early and middle stages also represented political music, but kept a distance from provocative and fashionable popular idioms.
Mikis Theodorakis not only pursues the exquisite composition, active social resistance, and popularizes the extremely successful quasi-trident aesthetics, but also persists in his own way, which is impressive. As a result, he became the lead singer of Free Greece, especially in terms of vitality. As early as 1964, he gained fame with the music of Michael Cacoyannis’s film “Alexis Sorbas”, including Anthony Quinn. Became the prototype of the Greek masculine, robust, pure-bred Greeks dancing siltaki-so a long-lasting cliché time was installed. The inspiring music of Theodorakis played an important role. It has created an important folklore image throughout the world, and certainly satisfies the needs of entertainment. It doesn’t matter whether all this is “real” or not, because Theodorakis’s soundtrack seems to be an original invention-how something similar to Franz Schubert became a secondary pop.
Although “Alexis Sorbas” is still clearly located in Crete, Costas Gavras’ political thriller “Z” took place under the anonymous dictatorship in 1968. Although it is clearly related to the events in Greece in 1963. The suggestive music of Theodorakis once again contributed to an unforgettable effect.
Artistic folklore and political interference are with him. His life became a story of both suffering and success. He was born on the island of Chios in 1925, joined the resistance against the German occupiers in 1943, was exiled to the Penalty Islands as a dangerous leftist after the civil war in 1952, and experienced torture and arbitrary imprisonment-again after his return from exile The colonel’s regime in Paris in 1967. The cosmopolitan patriot Theodorakis became a symbol of heroic anti-fascism and a hero of free Greece. As a composer, conductor, and singer, together with Maria Fanturi, he was able to mobilize the masses. As a people’s forum with musical means, tall and strong men have become figures of the times.
He is not critical in his compositional methods and strategies. For him, a wide range of influence is more important than any law of aesthetic purity. His Pablo Neruda oratorio “Canto General” became an international hymn against totalitarianism, but he also wrote symphonies. On the eve of the 2004 Athens Olympics, he completed his Greek tetralogy in 2002: “Erica”, “Medea” and “Antigone”, followed by “Lysis” in 2002. Terrata, Aristophanes is more than just cheerful comedy women who refuse to love their husbands and discourage eternal war. The previous year, “Prometheus” premiered at the Megaron Theater and was composed by another great Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis, who also came from the anti-fascist resistance movement in exile in Paris. Reached the extreme.
His political activities are as changeable as his music, consistent but not dogmatic, always anti-right, and the left is not without controversy. In the world of “real socialism”, just like in East Germany, it was distrusted and rejected, and then re-appropriated. However, important international musicians such as Dmitry Shostakovich, Benjamin Britton, Henze and Leonard Bernstein expressed their solidarity with him when he was on the verge of extinction. He doesn’t care about contradictions, and succinctly admitted in his autobiography “Angel’s Road”: “You start with some specific things, and then something completely different appears.”
Wolf Biermann called him an “arrogant bastard”, brazenly, and sincerely called him a man who never gets angry. Until the end, he still felt uneasy, protesting again and again against war and exploitation, and fiercely opposed the EU’s austerity requirements imposed on Greece. His political behavior may be gleaming, spontaneous and unpredictable, and his composition is always effective. As a character, he is impressive. There will be no more people like him. He died in Athens on Wednesday at the age of 96.
