Tributes as ‘genius’ Chariots Of Fire composer Vangelis dies aged 79
Vangelis, the Greece-born electronic composer who wrote the Academy Awardwinning score for the film Chariots Of Fire and music for dozens of other movies, documentaries and TV series, has died aged 79.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and other government officials expressed their condolences.
“Vangelis Papathanassiou is no longer among us,” Mr Mitsotakis tweeted.
Greek media reported that Vangelis died in a French hospital on Wednesday.
Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou on March 29 1943 near the city of Volos in central Greece, Vangelis started playing the piano at the age of four, although he got no formal training and claimed he never learned to read notes.
He played in several bands and solo, but his huge breakthrough came with the score for Chariots Of Fire, a 1981 film that told the story of two British runners in the 1920s.
Vangelis’s score received one of the four Academy Awards the film won.
The signature piece is one of the hardest-to-forget film tunes worldwide – and has also served as the musical background to endless slowmotion parodies.
Vangelis’s initial encounter with success came with his first Greek pop band in the 1960s.
He evolved into a one-man quasi-classical orchestra, using a vast array of electronic equipment to conjure up his enormously popular undulating waves of sound.
A private, humorous man — burly, with shoulder-length hair and a trim beard — he quoted ancient Greek philosophy and saw the artist as a conduit for a basic universal force.
He was fascinated by space exploration and wrote music for celestial bodies but said he never sought stardom himself.
Still, a micro-planet spinning somewhere between Mars and Jupiter — 6354 Vangelis — will forever bear his name.
“Orchestration, composition — they teach these things
in music schools, but there are some things you can never teach,” he said in a 1982 interview.
“You can’t teach creation.”
He wrote scores for several Greek films and was a founding member — together with another later-to-be internationally famous Greek musician,
Demis Roussos — of Aphrodite’s Child before they pursued solo projects.