San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Marxist composer of ‘Zorba’ fought repressive Greek junta
Mikis Theodorakis, the renowned Greek composer and Marxist firebrand who waged a war of words and music against an infamous military junta that imprisoned and exiled him as a revolutionary and banned his work a half century ago, died on Thursday at his home in central Athens. He was 96.
The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, according to a statement on his website. His family said in a statement read on Greek state television that his body would lie in state, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared three days of national mourning.
Theodorakis was best known internationally for his scores for the films “Zorba the Greek” (1964), in which Anthony Quinn starred as an essence of tumultuous Greek ethnicity; “Z” (1969), CostaGavras’ dark satire on the Greek junta; and “Serpico” (1973), Sidney Lumet’s thriller starring Al Pacino as a New York City cop who goes undercover to expose police corruption.
In the early 1970s, Greek exiles were fond of sharing a story about an Athens policeman who walks his beat humming a banned Theodorakis song. Hearing it, a passerby stops the policeman and says, “Officer, I’m surprised that you are humming Theodorakis.” Whereupon the officer arrests the man on a charge of listening to Theodorakis’ music.
Contradictions were a way of life in Greece in the era of a junta that repressed thousands of political opponents during its rule, from 1967 to 1974. But to many Greeks, Theodorakis was a metronome of resistance. While he was put away for his ideals, his forbidden rebellious music was a reminder to his people of freedoms that had been lost.
“Always I have lived with two sounds — one political, one musical,” he told The New York Times in 1970.
After he was released from prison into exile in 1968, he began an international campaign of concerts and contacts with world leaders that helped topple the regime in Athens four years later. It was a turning point for democracy, with a new constitution and a membership in the European Economic Community, which later became the European Union.
As Greece’s most illustrious composer, Theodorakis wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, music for the stage, marches for protests and songs without borders — an oeuvre of hundreds of classical and popular pieces that poured from his pen in good times and bad, even in the confines of drafty prison cells, squalid concentration camps and years of exile in a remote mountain hamlet.
He also wrote anthems of wartime resistance and socialist tone poems about the plight of workers and oppressed peoples. His most famous work on political persecution was the haunting “Mauthausen Trilogy,” named for a World War II Nazi concentration camp used mainly to exterminate the intelligentsia of Europe’s conquered lands. It has been described as the most beautiful music ever written on the Holocaust.
Theodorakis’ music made him a wealthy communist. Having paid his dues to society, he did not apologize for his privileged life as a member of Parliament, with homes in Paris, Athens and the Greek Peloponnesus; for being feted at premieres of his work in New York, London and Berlin; or for counting cultural and political leaders in Europe,
Mikis Theodorakis, shown in about 1945, was a prolific Greek composer and dedicated communist who was imprisoned and tortured for his beliefs and his opposition to the military junta that controlled Greece in the 1960s and ’70s.
Theodorakis attends a University of Athens rally against a new Greek austerity policy in May 2011.
America and the Middle East as friends.
During World War II, he joined a communist youth group that fought fascist occupation forces in Greece. After the war, his name appeared on a police list of wartime resisters, and he was rounded up with thousands of suspected communists and sent for three years to the island of Makronisos, the site of a notorious prison camp. There he contracted tuberculosis, and he was tortured and subjected to mock executions by being buried alive.
Theodorakis studied at music conservatories in Athens and Paris in the 1950s, writing symphonies, chamber music, ballets, and assorted rhapsodies, marches and adagios. He set to music the verses of eminent Greek poets, many of them communists. He also deepened his ties to communism: When Greece became
a Cold War battleground, he blamed not Stalin but the CIA.
As Greece plunged into political and economic turmoil in 1967, Col. George Papadopoulos led a military coup that seized power, suspended civil liberties, abolished political parties and established special courts. Thousands of political opponents were imprisoned or exiled.
Theodorakis, who had recently visited President Fidel Castro of Cuba, went into hiding. An arrest warrant was issued, and a military court sentenced him in absentia to five months in prison. Bans were decreed on playing, selling or even listening to his music.
Months later, he was arrested and jailed in Athens. He continued to compose music in his cell. Five months later, he, his wife and their two children were banished to Zatouna, a mountain village in the Peloponnesus, where they remained for three years.
Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Harry Belafonte and composer Dmitry Shostakovich led calls for Theodorakis’ release, to no avail. For the last months of his detention in 1970, he was moved to a prison camp at Oropos, north of Athens. He was coughing up blood and running a fever. To stifle rumors that he had been beaten to death, the junta showed him to foreign reporters.
The European government told Greece it was violating its treaty on human rights and called on the junta to end torture, release political prisoners and hold free elections. The colonels rejected the appeal, but they released Theodorakis
and sent him and his family into exile in Paris, where he was hospitalized and treated for tuberculosis.
Three months later, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in his triumphant “March of the Spirit.” The crowd’s emotions spilled over. “It was as if Zorba himself were conducting,” Newsweek wrote at the time. “When it ended, the audience wouldn’t let him leave; prolonged applause, cheers, stamping feet and rhythmic cries of ‘Theodorakis! Theodorakis!’ brought him back five times.”
The concert began Theodorakis’ four-year campaign for a peaceful overthrow of the junta. Touring the world, he gave concerts on every continent to raise funds for the cause of Greek democracy. He won support from cultural and political leaders. In Chile, he met the country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, and poet Pablo Neruda. He later composed movements to Neruda’s “Canto General,” his history of the New World from a Hispanic perspective.
He was received by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and President François Mitterrand of France. Swedish leader Olof Palme, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Theodorakis’ old friend Melina Mercouri, the actress who had become the Greek minister of culture, pledged help. Artists and writers around the world became his allies.
By 1973, facing international pressure and a restless civilian population, the junta’s hold was shaky. A student uprising in Athens escalated into open
revolt. Hundreds of civilians were injured, some fatally, in clashes with troops. Papadopoulos was ousted, and martial law was imposed by a new hard-liner. In 1974, the junta collapsed when senior military officers withdrew their support.
Within days, Theodorakis returned home in triumph, welcomed by large crowds, his music playing constantly on the radio. “My joy now is the same that I felt waiting in a cell to be tortured,” he said. “It was all part of the same struggle.”
Former Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis also returned from exile and formed a national unity government. Greece’s monarchy was abolished, a new constitution was adopted and, in 1981, Greece joined the European Economic Community.
Michael George Theodorakis was born on the Aegean island of Chios on July 29, 1925, the older of two sons of Georgios and Aspasia (Poulakis) Theodorakis. He and his brother, Yannis, were raised in provincial cities. Their father was a lawyer. Their mother, an ethnic Greek from what is now Turkey, taught her sons Greek folk music and Byzantine liturgy.
Yannis became a poet and songwriter. Mikis wrote his first songs without musical instruments and gave his first concert at 17.
In 1953, he married Myrto Altinoglou. They had two children, Margarita and George. (Information on his survivors was not immediately available.)