In the fall of 1960 Columbia Recordings of Greece released Epitaphios (Epitaph), composed and conducted by Mikis Theodorakis, based on a poem written by Greece’s “communist” poet Yannis Ritsos. Mikis Theodorakis had not yet achieved the international acclaim that his scoring of the films “Zorba the Greek,” “Z,” “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” and Neruda’s “Canto General” would bring him a few years later, but this piece earned him instant fame within Greece, for it exploded onto the Greek cultural scene with tremendous force. Within weeks Epitaphios swept the country, broke sales records and stunned producers and musicians with its success. From the upscale quarter of Kolonaki to the proletarian neighborhood of Kokkinia, the streets resonated with the music-blaring from tinny radios in taxis, sung by university students, played in clubs, and danced to in taverns. Though the music was different from anything the country had heard until then, it was immediately recognizable as authentically Greek, for while it broke from tradition it was clearly an extension of it. As Mikis himself said, “With Epitaphios I succeeded in composing a music which the people had already heard, but only in their imagination.” The thirty-five year old composer’s startling piece redefined Greek music and culture, and did much to shape the temper and spirit of modern Greece.
Yet perhaps it is too much to expect anything to be born into the world pure, in a natural state, untainted by the bile of politics. The gods and goddesses always remind the Greeks of their mortality, especially when they create immortal works. Mikis Theodorakis’ very own Epitaphios had already hit the streets of Athens three weeks earlier, because Mikis had sent his scoring forEpitaphios to another composer, Manos Hadjidakis. When Mikis heard Manos’ version as it was being prepared in the studio of Fidelity, he decided he didn’t like what he heard and went on to record a new version with Columbia. The almost simultaneous release of two distinct recordings of the most radical and powerful music modern Greece had yet heard signaled the beginning of a rivalry between the two composers, a rivalry into which they were drawn unwillingly. This rivalry grew more intense over the years and subsided only after the dictatorship fell, but traces of it have a subversive way of showing up even today, in 2007. This is because the music echoed two different visions of modern Greece – visions which continue to divide the country to this day.
The two visions of Greece can be bite-sized down to this: The first, a progressive though amorphous populism with socialist roots, representing a nationalist and sometimes strident “Greece-first” philosophy; the other, a deep respect and awe for the achievements of Western civilization, a desire to live inside a world without fanatics and fanaticism.
The two visions are as different as the composers themselves. Mikis is a tall imposing man, with a full head of hair and an impressive nose; Manos is short and over-weight, with sad puppy-dog eyes and jowly cheeks, and since the 1970s he no longer was afraid to hide his homosexuality. The image of himself that Theodorakis continues to promote is invariably that of the artiste engagee or the political leader. Pictures in his books show him being carried on the shoulders of supporters, over-whelmed by well-wishers at the airport, or surrounded by important foreign politicians. The classic shot (1974) shows him conducting an orchestra before thousands of people in a soccer stadium. His thick locks of black hair droop over his forehead, his eyes are closed in ecstatic concentration, his body is all energy and command, and with one arm stretched up dramatically, the other extended horizontally, he is the ever-virile maestro. Behind him, a sea of blurred faces-the masses themselves listening to “their” composer. In contrast, pictures of Manos show a man in the comfortable company of poets, playwrights, and friends, garbed in baggy pants, loafers and a khaki shirt which expands over his portly stomach, reclining in a chair in an Athens café.
Like the appearance, the substance behind it has both elements of truth and illusion. Mikis was a member of the National Liberation Front (EAM), the left-wing partisan group that fought the Germans in WWII. But Manos also began his youth with those exact same leftist roots, though he quickly abandoned them during the Civil War. During the German occupation, he became a member of EAM’s theater group, “Free Artists”, traveling to sections of “liberated Greece” where he accompanied on piano the theatrical performances. In Larissa his presence in this group cost him his front teeth, the result of a fight with a member of the fanatic right wing known simply as “X.”
“I admire him,” movie director Nikos Koundouros said years later, “this man who was as self-absorbed as any coquette, because he didn’t bother to fix his teeth for over thirty years simply because the idea of sitting at a dentist’s chair with his mouth open absolutely bored him.” This give a sense of Manos as an aesthete with a “who cares” attitude about many of the details in his life.
Manos rejected the left’s involvement in the civil war and embraced upper-class Athens, trained in classical music, best able to appreciate his scores. For their part, the so-called Athenian bourgeoisie adopted this young, brash and talented composer with squeals of delight. After all, he carried with him the titillating residue of a liberation struggle, without the dreaded taint of communism.
While Manos was making good with the Athenian society, Mikis on the run from the secret police, who were especially on the lookout for him because he had written the communist youth party’s anthem. The two men had met a few years earlier, as members of EAM. Manos had heard about a tall young composer writing classical symphonies — like the String Quartet (1946) and the Requiem for Strings (1946) –and Manos made an effort to meet him. When Mikis escaped to Athens, in 1947, just as the Civil War was in the middle of its trajectory, Mikis turned to Manos for refuge. Manos too him in. He would bring Mikis with him to parties, introducing him by another name, so that Mikis could get something to eat and put a few pounds on his nearly emaciated body. Because Manos lived in a small apartment with his mother and sister in Pangrati, he would slip Mikis into the Music Hall of Athens after the parties were over. Here Mikis would stretch his long frame along the velvet seats and sleep.
When the police finally caught up with Mikis, they sent him to the notorious concentration camps on the island of Makroniso, then on to a hilltop village in the far island of Ikaria. In the early 1950s the conservative regime released and exiled him once again, this time to the notorious island of Leros, a place to which the colonels would return him in 1967. Throughout the 1950s he wrote numerous articles concerning the need to create “art for the masses”, a dangerous agenda in a century littered with bad art serving “good” politics. His wholehearted entanglement with politics, however, led his music in a different direction. He wrote, perhaps rather mechanistically although in hindsight not at all, that “Greece needed art which sprang from the popular struggle and from living-modern Greek poetry.” This sounds overblown except when you discover that he ended up doing just that.
His emphasis on authenticity and his search for Greek roots – a search which was inspired by women singing when he was exiled to Ikaria, appealed to the anti-Western sentiment of the left. In fact his travels across Greece, either to fight the Germans, or to serve time in prisons and islands across the Aegean brought him in touch with Greek folklore and traditional music and did much to free him of his obsession with classical composition.
Mikis has always seen himself as a leader and not a follower, as a member of the vanguard of the working class. Perhaps his own sense of his role in politics was influenced by his talent as a composer and especially his role as a maestro, from the pulpit of which has was to lead his large orchestra. His need to pursue a political struggle while composing music led to a series of odd political choices. His quest for leadership led him along a path of political compromise reminiscent of the ancient Alcibiades, “whose conduct displayed many great inconsistencies and variations”, but unfortunately for Theodorakis, with far less success than that of that ancient political magician. From being a vocal communist, in the last thirty odd years, Mikis served in some form in all the major political parties. Most recently and most surprisingly, between 1989 and 1991, he served as Minister without Portfolio in the conservative party, a party whose roots lie in the repressive regimes of the 1950s which incarcerated him. Much later he would say, “I didn’t change. The political parties changed.”
In contrast, Manos was never arrested for his political sympathies. His leftist origins were completely forgotten, to such an extent that he became a close friend of conservative prime minister Constantine Caramanlis. Nikos Koundouros, a proclaimed leftist himself and a bit of a tease, found Manos’ stance refreshing. “I liked Manos because he adored Caramanlis when the rest of us hated him.”
In 1960 Mikis was as yet unknown to the public at large, while Manos Hadjidakis was Greece’s most famous composer. He had just received an Oscar for the music to the movie “Never on Sunday”, starring Melina Mercouri. For all his allegedly pro-Western leanings, in the 1950s he was responsible for a return to Greek roots because he succeeded in single handedly revivingrebetiko music, Greece’s equivalent of the blues. Manos had also scored music for dozens of Greek movies and had co-founded the country’s only modern folk dance troupe, the “Elliniko Chorodrama” with Rallou Manou, for which he composed music for ballet (Το καταραμένο φίδι, Έξι Λαϊκες Ζωγραφιές, and Ερημιά).
Their method of composition differs as greatly as their personalities. Mikis, in spite of his spontaneous and explosive character, always demanded separate musical scores for each instrument, as well as the conductor’s score. Even though Mikis possesses all the characteristics of the “undisciplined Greek,” in his ritual of scoring as well as conducting he resembles a “European.”
Manos usually created only under pressure, leaving things until the last minute, without any musical scores or notes. A typical story is told by Jules Dassin, who had asked Manos to score the music for his “Never on Sunday,” which starred Dassin’s wife, Melina Mercouri. The weeks passed, the movie was near completion, but Manos had yet to provide the director even a single note. One day Dassin reminded Manos that he was still waiting for the soundtrack. Manos looked at him, asked him to remind him of the story, then sat down at a piano and banged out the whole score in about half an hour. From this short burst of inspiration was born one of Greece’s most famous melodies, “Ta paidia tou Peiraia”, which earned Manos the Oscar.
Manos, the westerner, in the manner in which he composed music and the almost lazy way he went about his business, is more reminiscent of the caricature of the slothful Mediterranean. Nikos Koundouros described being in the studio for a recording session with Manos and the great bouzouki player Vassilis Tsitsanis. There was Tsitsanis, he recalls, calm, without any expression on his face, like a priest preparing for some sacred rite, while across him sat Manos, hunched over a cigarette box, trying to carve a few notes into the box’s top, a bit of scoring which never had the opportunity to be spread across a musical sheet. Known for his tendency to procrastinate, Manos had the word “sorry” nearly etched into his lips.
Of course their differences go beyond the creative process of composition and recording. In sharp contrast to Mikis, Manos believed that “your own songs will emerge from your dreams and feelings and not from the local party office.” He quoted George Brassens that, “life in the apartment, class struggle, are all very interesting. But they do not become songs.” Mikis however, saw things differently. “Now the simple people, the working struggling people need a complete artistic work through which they can express their personality, which is that of poet and fighter. The spiritual base of the popular songs is Poetry – Struggle – Music.”
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Nowhere are the distinctions between the two composers more apparent than in the dawn of their rivalry. For Epitaphios, where Mikis’ composition demanded a strong male voice, Manos substituted the as yet unknown semi-operatic female voice of Nana Mouskouri; where Mikis called for bouzouki, Manos brought in an orchestra; where Mikis required hard, driven sounds, Manos softened them, made them more lyrical and classical. Miki’s version relied heavily on the “reviled” stringed instrument, the bouzouki, and Ritsos’ words were sung by a throaty male singer, Bithikotsis, with backup by female vocalist Ketty Thimi. Ultimately Manos de-emphasized the words and brought the music up to center stage.
One music critic, although writing for the communist newspaper AVGI, was sharply critical of the communist composer:
Hadjidakis abandoned the composer’s (i.e. Theodorakis’) indication that the music be played by bouzouki alone, and instead chose a discreet instrumental accompaniment. One smells the perfume, the lightness and even the depth of the popular song which does not betray the musical conception but sustains its ecstasy and poetic urge.
The official communist left rebelled against Mikis’ version because it felt that their saint of saints, Yannis Ritsos, had somehow been defiled by the presence of a bouzouki and the kind of music usually sung by hash users and riff-raff. The communist party itself prohibited exiled members from singing the Epitaph. Oddly enough, both the prison guards and the prisoners received the same orders: don’t sing Mikis!
At first the presence of the two recordings did little to detract from their success, since they both continued to co-exist at the top of the charts. Soon their differences became the subject of newspaper articles analyzing the definition of “Greekness” and aesthetic sensibility in Greek music. Does Greece belong to the East or to the West? Does Manos’ lyricism respect Ritsos’ poetry more than Mikis’? Is Mikis’ version authentically Greek? What is authentic in a culture that has roots in Byzantium, Ottoman rule and Frankish invasions? Is the bouzouki a proper instrument for poetry? By December 1960, a few months after the release of both records, the situation had become so charged that a newspaper wrote about the “minor civil war that threatens to break out over the two versions, with struggle committees springing up all over the city.” A student union sponsored discussions between both composers after playing each version and then put the matter of which version was best to a vote. Mikis Theodorakis’ version won that vote. (I am not sure which would win if the same contest were held today, but I suspect that Mikis would once again come out on top. I tried it at a discussion of this essay. The result? Mikis.)
The openly revolutionary message of the poetry and Theodorakis’ political activism began to divide the audience between those who supported Mikis and those who didn’t. Mikis’ version became a rallying point for progressive gatherings and anti-government demonstrations. Soon, at least in terms of sales, Mikis’ version was winning the battle. Of that period, Manos Hadjidakis, thirty years later, still apparently unreconciled about his lesser commercial success, recounts:
Theodorakis wanted to lie down on the Procrustean bed of the popular song and of course he succeeded because of Bithikotsis’ voice. The public, the leftists, preferred his Epitaphios while others, the bourgeoisie, preferred my version with Mouskouri. The former saw the music as an epic, the latter saw it emotionally. Both versions complete the work and poetry…The leftists would have preferred his music regardless.
On the other hand, today Mikis recognizes that the presence of Manos’ Epitaphios allowed him to penetrate into sections of the population which would normally be shut off to him, “because if there had only been my version, no member of the upper class would have ever listened to me.” Strange as it seems, Theodorakis’ success is due in part to Hadjidakis, who legitimized the communist composer by working with him and putting out his record. Theodorakis had no idea that this piece would define him as the new composer and that it would garner such support. In fact when he played it first for the poets Nikos Gatsos and nobel-prize winner Odysseas Elytis, in the presence of Manos himself, the only one who liked it was Manos’ mother.
Theodorakis added oil to the fire by writing articles defending the Greekness of this music, in a similar vein to the ones he had written earlier. Whenever he had the chance he gave speeches about the need for art for the masses. He began a tour of the countryside to play his music, a countryside whose Civil War (1946-1949) wounds had still not healed. The government tried to contain his activities and in some cases that resulted in violence when the local police intervened to stop his performances. This served only to make his music more popular. Soon the question of aesthetics was overshadowed by politics. In contrast to Mikis – the vocal agitator for the forces of change and progress – Manos’ silence on political issues, for many, and in particular his detractors, was interpreted as evidence that he was on the side of the privileged and the elite of Greece.
Without the unavoidable standard set by Mikis, the artiste engagee par excellence, perhaps Manos would have escaped the label of being a representative of the establishment. Mikis perpetual political motion seemed to send the message across Greece that it was not enough for an artist to be devoted to his craft, he also had to take openly progressive political positions.
Thus it came that music became an expression of political sympathies, and progressives began to listen to Theodorakis to the exclusion of Hadjidakis, while conservatives did the opposite. Until very recently, one could infer the political sensibilities of most Greeks through their record collection and their expressions (grimaces, hands covering the face, passionate applause) when hearing music of either composer.
The distance between Manos and the progressives in Greece reached a maximum during the dictatorship (1967-1974). On the one hand Mikis’ music had been banned, thus anointing him by default as the official musician of the resistance. The Colonels, and Minister of the Interior Odysseas Angelis in particular, prohibited anybody from “listening” to Theodorakis music. A joke from that period goes like this: A policeman stands behind someone at a pedestrian crossing, and sings a Mikis tune. The policeman then proceeds to arrest the man in question, on the grounds that he was “listening” to Theodorakis.)
On the other hand, some clumsy mistakes on Manos’ part were immediately latched onto by his detractors as proof of his collaboration with the reviled junta. In New York to record music with the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, Manos spoke badly about actress Melina Mercouri, at that point the personification of the defiant Greek spirit combating the evil military back home. She would appear on stage with Joan Baez at Madison Square Gardens, or show up at an anti-war sit-in at Columbia University and emote passion against the dictators and the American government. Manos said something to the effect that his famous friend was trying to promote her career through political appearances and her resistance activities. Let’s not forget that Melina was working closely with Caramanlis’ main political opponent, Andreas Papandreou, and this might explain Manos’ impatience with the fiery phenomenon known as Melina. (Jacques Lang, the former Minister of Culture of France, at the funeral eulogy for Melina in 1994, who died while still serving as Greek Minister of Culture, she was a “femme phare, femme flamme, femme femme,” in lovely, alliterative French.) If things were not so politicized, little would have been made of Mano’s comments, and they would have been seen as a reflection of personal differences and stage rivalries.
The second and more serious misstep on Manos’ part was that he allowed himself to be photographed with one of the Colonels, Makarezos, and the latter made sure the picture circulated around the world, to lend the Greek military regime legitimacy. After all, Manos was known for his Never on Sunday and his Oscar. His friendship with Caramanlis, the taint of being a conservative, as well as the fact that those years were intensely politicized, resulted in him being ostracized by all progressives and assorted leftists. The final blow was that picture with Makarezos. By the early 1970s, his public image had reached an all time low.
As it turned out, Manos had his own reasons for being photographed with the Colonel. He had been blackmailed into it because he owed so much in back taxes. Manos never cared about such things and was notoriously uninterested in money. Once he helped a poor friend by writing him a tune and then told the man he was free to sell it for whatever it would get. The junta gave Manos a stark choice: we get the picture or you get the jail.
Redemption came however from Mikis himself, in one of those twists of history that make you wonder if things aren’t sometimes pre-ordained for the purposes of creating tighter narratives. When the dictators fell in the summer of 1974, Mikis returned to Greece. Manos remained in New York. That fall Athens hosted the most legendary musical concert in modern Greek history. It was held in the Panathinaikos soccer stadium, and its ostensible purpose was to honor the return of Democracy. (The concert was filmed as a wonderful documentary by none other than director Nikos Koundouros, titled “Songs of Fire,” 1975.) Mikis, who did time in the infamous Bouboulina prisons before being exiled abroad by the dictators, was at the peak of his political influence. He had reached the point where he had always dreamed of reaching. He was the hero, returned from exile, the banned artist who’d suffered for his beliefs. More than at any other time in his life, at that concert, Mikis embodied everything he had imagined himself to be – musician, hero, politician, conductor, creator, sheer force on earth. At that concert he combined the role of musical conductor with that of political leader. He played Ritsos’ poems, with Ritsos standing right next to him, a poet who had also achieved rock-star status among the Greeks. Mikis mesmerized the crowd with the forceful delivery of his hitherto banned music. He sang in his peculiarly high and slightly offnote, distinctive Mikis-voice. He shook the baton. His large body careened back and forth on the makeshift stage. He sweated. He bowed, he smiled, he closed his eyes in ecstasy, he felt his music, he lived it. The crowd pounded its feet. The crowd roared its freedom. And the intensity, was oddly enough, not mere Greek hyperbole. Mikis the excitement, the joy, the sheer exuberance that permeated the people of this newly liberated country. The concert made its permanent mark the Greeks who attended, and its fame spread out its influence to those who heard about it, who listened to it, who saw the documentary – a little bit like the concert at Woodstock which did much to define the sixties generation in the States.
At the apogee of his influence, whatever Mikis said on the stage had special resonance. At this shimmering moment in history, he could not have chosen a better moment than to redeem Manos, to come to his friend’s aid, to help the man who had saved him from the secret police back in 1947, who had taken him in when he was a fugitive on the run from the secret police. Time to forgive and move on. At some point in the evening, Mikis paused dramatically and said he wanted to make a wish. “I wish that my good friend Manos will return quickly to his country.” The response was overwhelming – prolonged applause. Mikis meant of course that Manos should return not only get on the direct flight out of New York on Olympic Airways, but that he should be allowed back into the hearts of the Greeks. With Mikis’ royal dictat of absolution, he re-legitimized Manos in the eyes of the progressives. The wagging tongues were silenced and the two composers now started their careers as members of the reborn Hellenic Republic with a clean slate.
***
None of this answers the questions as to why the music was so resoundingly powerful. Why did it capture the imagination of the Greeks so forcefully? The music alone could not have been so passionately held, could not have spoken directly to the heart, if it had not relied on the power of Ritsos’ revolutionary call to arms. The poem deserves attention, for it goes far in explaining the instant success of Epitaphios. Yannis Ritsos, recipient of the Lenin prize, a friend of Aragon, Hikmet and Ehrenburg (and who is usually compared to Chile’s Pablo Neruda), had written his epic poem in 1936, inspired by a picture in a newspaper of a mother mourning her dead son, slain in a strike in the city of Thessaloniki. Like folk art, the poem is austere, simple, and accessible to all. In his early years, the ones during which he wrote this piece, Ritsos was going through a phase in which he wished to speak directly to his audience, an audience Ritsos presumed to belong to the working class and therefore to be revolutionary by nature. Later, of course, his poetry becomes less transparent, less didactic, more personal and ultimately more powerful.
The poem resonates with history and draws power from the Christian mythology of resurrection and the mother – son symbology. The poem relies on the traditional couplet for mourning and lament and so taps into the country’s natural linguistic rhythm for pain and suffering. Ritsos wrote his poem using the so-called “fifteen syllable” beat. This is the heart of most Greek rhyme, used by Greek poets as far back as six hundred years ago (Erotocritos) and by Vilaras and Solomos, the father of modern Greek language, over two hundred years ago. Such a beat emerges automatically from the Greek language. It has come down to the people through the ages and has been the natural medium for all kinds of poetry, heroic, epic, ballad, erotic or mournful. As Rick Newton put it in the prologue to his translation of Ritsos’ poem, “in echoing the Byzantine Epitaphios mourning, secular funeral songs, and the message of the Greek National Anthem, Ritsos not only touches the hearts of his reader but also raises their spirit.”
Because of its length, its uneven quality and its overtly political message, the poem or excerpts from it are rarely included in poetry anthologies, yet in its strongest moments it transcends the banal and propagandistic. Ritsos was too good a poet even at his most didactic. In the poem we find the mother mourning her dead son. Yet the mother’s sense of desperation soon gives way to optimism when she decides to continue her son’s struggle, an optimism the Greek thirsted for after years of oppressive conservative rule. The first verse that Theodorakis chose to score begins: “A day in May you left me/a day in May I lose you,” and the poem ends on the steady note of continued struggle with the following couplet: “My son, I’m going to your brothers and sisters and adding my rage/I’ve taken your rifle. Sleep my sweet child.” This ending is strongly reminiscent of a Greek folk song, “Kitsos’ Mother,” about a young Greek revolutionary being led to his death through his village by the Turks. In that song, when the mother sees the son and the remaining prisoners march by in chains, she tells him to stop complaining, to hand over the belt of bullets slung across his chest and to tell her where he’s hidden his rifle.
A large part of Greece of the 1960s was more prepared to listen to Theodorakis than to Hadjidakis. The poem expressed the demand for social reform, a natural enough demand after the bloody civil war in the 1940s and the ten hard years of McCarthy-type oppression, exile and political assassinations that followed. The rural populations had recently moved into the working-class neighborhoods of Athens and were becoming more politically aggressive, while the students in the universities were eager to vent their growing frustration with the conservative and anti-populist regime. But what lent extraordinary power to the poem was the music itself-the hard, haunting melodies of Mikis Theodorakis’ composition, the natural rhythm of the music, the hoarse voice of the immortal Bithikotsis and the driven notes of the bouzouki, played by the greatest bouzouki player of all time.
Theodorakis chose for his bouzouki player a man from an earlier era, Manolis Chiotis, whose ability on the instrument – a cross between a balalaika and a mandolin – is considered unsurpassed in this century. Chiotis was influenced by the disappearing group of musicians known as “rebetes,” rebel musicians of a previous era who had never been involved in politics or ever achieved the status of musical stars, for they lived in obscurity and poverty, and played for the nightworld of hash smokers and petty criminals. Chiotis actually belongs to the group of musicians known as the “archonto-rebetes,” who played a more upscale and “dignified” form of rebetiko. He was responsible for adding an extra string to the bouzouki, which from being three-stringed became four-stringed. This allowed him to exploit his dexterity, but it also made the bouzouki more accessible to a larger audience, because with four strings one could include European-type melodies and move beyond the twang of “Eastern” sounds.
Now, for the first time, a member with rebetiko roots was called upon to serve a powerful poem with revolutionary content. Theodorakis succeeded in linking the old and dying world of the rebetes to the new world of politics, and it seemed as if for once the apolitical rebetes had found a voice. The actual voice on the record is that of Bithikotsis, whom Theodorakis had met in exile. His voice is strong and masculine, recalling the fallen workers of 1936 and the long list of victims that followed, those that fell in the Civil War or were exiled to the islands. Theodorakis, ever politically aware, always on the side of the proletariat, wrote that the he chose Bithikotsis for his “common man’s” voice, “the voice you hear in the streets, the voice of the construction worker, the chauffeur, the man singing for the joy of singing.”
About his inspiration for that piece Mikis later wrote:
……as soon as I read his (Ritsos’) poems, I began writing songs spontaneously, without effort. And the music appeared as you have heard it. Popular. Why; it sprang from the need to respect Ritsos’ poetry.
Theodorakis, for all his political pronouncements, still maintained enough of his artistic brio and independence to allow politics to inspire rather than command and consume him. Theodorakis was obliged to respect the built-in rhythms and resonances of Ritsos’ iambic pentameter. Theodorakis based a number of the songs on the traditional “zembekiko,” the tough guy’s lament, the music which is danced by a male, alone on the dance floor in slow, purposely clumsy movements. The zembekiko combines words, music, and movement to produce a marvelous unity. The rhythm of the zembekiko is nine-eighths (9/8). Theodorakis wrote:
The 9/8 rhythm which characterizes the zembekiko was born from the iambic pentameter (fifteen syllable) but when I wrote the music I was not aware of that. So how did I turn towards the zembekiko; When I began writing songs seven and eight (of eight) I scored the melodies to a unifying beat of 2/8, yet I knew something was missing. It is simple and let me explain it: Every melodic phrase, based on each of Ritsos’ couplets, took 4 meters of 2/8 each. In other words 2/8+2/8+2/8+2/8, yet the final beat on the last 2/8 was short, quick and without fullness. So I added a fifth meter of 2/8 to enlarge the ending. But now the ending seemed larger than it should have been. It was redundant. And suddenly I saw the solution, the truth lay somewhere between the 2 and 4, in other words, 3. The true rhythm had to be 2/8+2/8+2/8+3/8. This was the zembekiko! My melody, influenced by our popular music, carried organically within it the popular rhythm. This the truth!
Mikis Theodorakis was obliged to discover that what he initially thought to be a new beat, turned out to be the zembekiko rhythm played by the rebetes. This rhythm does not belong exclusively to the Greek rebetes, since it can be traced to traditional dances in Thrace, islands in the eastern Aegean and cities along the coast of Asia Minor. Much ink has been spilled over the search for the roots of the zembekiko, the male dance itself. Yorgos Papadakis, one of Greece’s top musicologists, tells us that although it is a dance with ancient roots, in its modern appearance it is used as a form of expression by men who have been tortured, men on the sidelines of life, the desperate and the disinherited. Another interpretation of this dance, where the male dances alone and hunched over, is provided by Thanos Veloudios, who in 1926 argued that the zembekiko is a form of prayer, a preparation for entering the daily battle of life.
The rebetiko voice is invariably hoarse, heavy, and decadent, dragging out the mournful syllables in extended notes. Like rebetiko music, a number of the eight songs of Epitaphios begin with improvised bouzouki leads, usually in minor notes, echoing melancholy and loss, but unlike the fatalistic determinism of the rebetiko, as the tracks progress, Theodorakis’ bouzouki grows hopeful and optimistic, replete with major chords sounding the cheer of the continued struggle, of triumph and persistence. From the outset, the sound of Theodorakis’ bouzouki is less Eastern and more driven, more certain, more haunting. The bouzouki solos complete the voice rather than against it, and serve as advance warning for the vocals.
The eight songs draw from the music which Mikis had been studying in Paris in the late 1950s: the mourning songs of Mani, the Zakynthean ballad, the Cretan dirge, the Aegean island music, Byzantine church psalms, thus plumbing the Greek “collective unconscious.” These forms coalesced and merged into a radically new form which both respected Greek tradition and transcended it.
Yet, without Manos, Mikis may not have been able to even imagine his composition, for, in the words of Melina Mercouri, “It was Manos that made us listen to the bouzouki.” It was Manos who in the 1950s was responsible for focusing attention on traditional Greek music. He single-handedly revived the dying rebetiko, the same rebetiko which Mikis would listen to in his late twenties and early thirties.
By the late 1940s the establishment had succeeded in ostracizing the rebetiko and its musicians, the rebetes, from “good” Greek society. The subject matter of rebetiko songs was slightly subversive, for it spoke of poverty and the crushing weight of an unfair society. The music did not have the overtly political character that Theodorakis would bring to it in the 1960s. Precisely because the bouzouki was played by shadowy night – people before an equally illicit clientele, the instrument itself became associated with illegal activity. The rebetiko music forged a dividing line between the Greece of last names and easy bank credit on the one side, and the anonymous and the oppressed on the other. A man carrying a bouzouki in the late 1940s stood a strong chance of being stopped by the police and questioned about his habits.
As a historical curiosity, in 1934 Kemal Attaturk, in his effort to Europeanize Turkey, banned the eastern-sounding songs known as αμανέδες. Apparently a number of Greek intellectuals were of similar temperament and convinced Metaxa, Greece’s dictator, to do something similar. A censorship committee was established, and this committee examined the music of the rebetes, in order to reduce the “eastern” influence in their songs. This meant doing away with certain minor notes and halfnotes which brought to mind eastern roots. But the committee was ill-prepared for the task, since the members were all classically trained musicologists. They were obliged to hire an authentic rebete, since none of them had ever set foot in one of those “dens of sin” where the music was played. The hired a young nineteen year old bouzouki player they had heard was quite good, to help them with their strange musical surgery: Vassilis Tsitsanis, who later became Greece’s most famous representative of that music.
The Greek working class had already taken the bouzouki into its heart, ignoring the ministrations and admonitions of the right, whose ruling class set the example by avoiding such places, and the communist party of Greece, which had forbidden its members to listen and dance to rebetiko music, in jail or outside it. One has only to read the powerful first-person narrative of Chronis Missios, in his book “You’re lucky, you died early,” to get a feel for the nearly evangelical sense of mission that permeated party members. A communist member was supposed to uphold the rigorous moral life of a Christian proselytizer, abjuring swearing, singing and above all refrain from singing or dancing to rebetiko music. This cultural fascism glibly destroyed one of the few remaining pleasures of their stalwart and imprisoned members.
On the thirty-first of January, in 1949, at the height of some of the most bloody battles of the Civil War, Manos Hadjidakis gave a lecture on Greek music in Athens. The lecture was attended by all of “high” Greek society, for Hadjidakis had already made a name for himself through his rendition of Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” (1947), and from music for movies and plays written by Tennessee Williams and Bernard Shaw. Yet, something of an upstart himself, Manos had invited two of the most important rebetiko players to his lecture, Vamvakaris and Tsitsanis. “The two wild men sitting up at the front,” Manos said to the aristocracy of Athens at one point by way of introduction,” are the Bach and Beethoven of Greek folk music.” The establishment was both excited and scandalized when it realized it was in the presence of such notoriously underworld musicians. “The rebetiko,” he continued, “succeeds, with admirable unity, in combining words, music and movement… the rebetiko song is authentically Greek, uniquely Greek.”
In one stroke Manos became the rebetiko’s midwife and forced the establishment to adopt this bastard child. Besides legitimizing the musical outcasts, Manos further contributed to the revival of the rebetiko by producing new and excellent rebetiko music himself. The imported music of the 1950s, the mambos, bossa-novas, and Italian melodies were soon pushed aside. Greeks were finally listening and appreciating their own music, even if they were still not producing “new” music.
Yet by the mid-1950s, as the country grew more prosperous, the bouzouki and the rebetiko music moved upscale, out of the hash-dens of the working class districts and into clubs like the Copacabana at Constitution Square, which tourists would pack into after a tour of the Acropolis, a bite of souvlaki in the old town of Plaka and a sip of retsina at a tavern. Plate smashing, glass throwing, and acrobatic dancing became part of the package. Soon the electric bouzouki made its appearance and sounds became louder and more commercial. The rebetiko, which many believe began as the authentic voice of a wounded Greece struggling to shake the Ottoman yoke, and which in the 1940s represented the artistic expression for those living on the edge of respectability, was now called upon to entertain the nouveau riche and the tourist, while the same aristocracy that had once scorned it now applauded and danced to its every note. By the late 1950s, the rebetiko craze reached its peak. Every aspiring composer tried his or her hand at the rebetiko form; every two-bit singer crooned its tunes, and every tourist went to sleep with the electric bouzouki buzzing in his ouzo-filled head. Finally, fast money succeeded in twisting it out of shape. Perhaps this is why Manos, ten years later, was already denying any interest in rebetiko. “Once the rebetiko became insufferably legitimate,” he said in an interview, “I denounced my relationship to it with disgust.”
Yet this statement is not completely accurate because Manos does revisit the rebetiko. In 1970 he will try to bring out the element of religious awe that the rebetiko provoked in him, in particular with his album “Rituals”, where he plays the piano and is accompanied by the unforgettable voice of Flery Dandonaki. In 1973 he will compose an adaptation of rebetiko songs, replacing the bouzouki with a mandolin, with vocals by Voula Savvidi, in the now famous album titled “Ta Perix.”
In actuality the death of the rebetiko at the end of the 1950s and its transformation into a caricature of itself represented the passing of an era in Greece. The conditions of poverty and escape which the rebetiko addressed had disappeared as Greeks grew wealthier. But for Mikis the important thing was not that rebetiko was dead but that its death brought no renewal; no composer seemed capable of picking up the baton where Manos had dropped it. A few months before the release of Mano’s version of his music, he wrote that Greek music had reached its “zero hour” and was ready for something different, something new. This something new turned out to be Epitaphios, a piece which resolved the cultural impasse and told the Greek that he could be Greek and more beyond tradition and create something new. Gerrard Pierrat, a French student of modern Greek culture, wrote that “with this music hope reappeared from an unexpected corner, for its existence proclaimed the good news that once again everything was possible.”
It was not as if Mikis alone had recognized the cultural impasse of the 1950s. For Manos the idolization of Greece’s classical past and the unqualified acceptance of modern Greek tradition were dangerous illusions that allowed bad art to be placed next to good. This was the art which encouraged dressing the Greek in 1800s evzone garb complete with pom-poms, or in European sailor dress, the art which had everybody imitating Lord Byron or Kolokotronis and parading them around Constitution Square to be photographed by the tourists. Manos was tired of the attitude that one’s father’s habits or one’s “Greek” peculiarities were something to be preserved and made sacred. He was tired of the “kitchness” of modern Greek culture, a situation which he unwittingly reinforced with the revival of the rebetiko. Manos was interested in his own “Greekness” only to the extent that it expressed something inimitable and natural in his person; he didn’t want to search it out, plumb its depths and lift it up for all to behold.
This dilemma is not unknown to the modern Greek. Ritsos himself addressed the Greek’s quest to escape the pitfalls of blind allegiance to tradition and incurable romanticizing of the past. “In the Ruins of an Ancient Temple,” he writes (translated by Edmund Keeley):
The museum guard was smoking in front of the sheepfold. The sheep were grazing among the marble ruins.
… A woman
spread her washed clothing on the shrubs and the statues – she spread her husband’s underpants on Hera’s shoulders.
Perhaps this is the proper attitude of the Greek towards his heredity. It is this desire to transcend the past, to avoid a continual “search for roots,” that Manos responds to in his music. Ritsos poem expresses our tendency to live along with the past, without turning the ancient marbles into something of a fetish. We need to be as comfortable around the Acropolis as we are with our underwear, Ritsos is saying.
This tension between a transcendent and continually renewable culture, and the manner through which artists will regenerate their culture is what unites and distinguishes Mikis and Manos. They are both aware of the pitfalls of relying on the past; Because of their special talents they did not allow themselves to be trapped in the past. In the nineteenth century musicians made a conscious effort to revive folk-songs and give them a modern spin, but nobody had the inspiration, talent and genius of Mikis or Manos so that effort resulted in folksy music for tourists.
Their interpretation of the past and their vision of the future is different. Their philosophies can be summed up by Pablo Neruda in a poem entitled “Explico Algunas Cosas,” in which Neruda, moving as he grew older in the opposite direction to Ritsos, explains once and for all why he abandoned the personal “I-based” poetry to the more political and revolutionary:
You will ask: And where are the lilacs;
And the metaphysics petalled with poppies;
…..come see the blood in the streets come see
the blood in the streets
come see the blood
in the streets.
I have heard it said that Manos is for the lilacs and poppies while Mikis is for the streets. Though these two tendencies are not mutually incompatible and can reside simultaneously in the spirit of each composer, they represent a different philosophical outlook on life. Ever sympathetic to the masses, Mikis tried to create a music along which the people could forge a national consensus, and he was very conscious of his success in doing so. If Manos had a mission, it was to avoid any sense of mission; it was to avoid searching for an authentic Greek music; it was to escape the self-referential images of Greece. Manos de-emphasizes the message of a song. In an interview, he said:
When words come in contact with what we call music,
they faint, lie down and surrender, they lose their natural
energy, their movement and life. And then the adventure
of the melody begins. The words come alive again, dusted off,
naked, fresh, and transformed when hung upon the five lines
of the scoresheet.
Not only is Manos’ music more melodic and lyrical, but his conceptual approach to the role of poetry in music is radically different than Mikis’. For Mikis it appears that the music serves the words and enlarges the message, like a large neon sign blazing above the Acropolis. For Manos the words serve the melody. At the dawn of his career he wrote music for the poetry of M. Sachtouris. One of these tells of a sailor walking on the moon and his girl singing to reach him but the song never gets to the moon. Another is about a boatman who goes from harbor to harbor but never wants to throw an anchor at any of them. “The melodization of these was natural,” Hadjidakis says, “they touched me.” Manos sees music in the words while Mikis sees words in the music. Manos revived Greek music; Mikis renewed and extended it.
The successes of these two composers has much to do with the homogeneity of Greek culture. The composers were able to write from “inside” Greek culture, because as Greeks they both understood traditional Greek music, the church hymn and the demotic songs, but they were also able to stand above their culture and consciously create music from the “outside,” as classically-trained composers. Blues music, often compared to rebetiko, was born at the turn of the century from a culture of a race burdened with four-hundred years of slavery and racism; this music can only be written from the inside-can a white really create soul or sing the blues? Yet in Greece, Mikis and Manos could consciously analyze rebetiko music, then imitate and extend it. This is what allowed someone with the musical sophistication of Manos Hadjidakis to copy someone like Tsitsanis, a man who created music but could neither read nor write a note of music himself, and this is what allowed Mikis to assert boldly at the dawn of his career that he intended to create music for the people and then sit down at his desk in Paris one night in the year of our lord 1958 and do just that.
Though Mikis receives full credit for the renewal of Greek music, Manos was the first to understand its potency, though he himself could not harness it. Manos infused the rebetiko with reserve and melancholy and in his hands the rebetiko becomes music for dancing and wine-filled evenings. As Melina Mercouri once said, “When I listen to the music of Mikis I am thrilled, when I listen to the music of Manos, I am seduced.” Mikis’ music can be listened to only on special occasions for it brings back memories, it demands attention, it is too powerful and emotionally loaded. The radio cannot lightly play “A Day in May I Lose You” without a reason, without attaching a program to his music, nor can it play the driven music of “Z” without recalling the assassinated leader Gregorios Lambrakis, or play the haunting “Ballad of Mauthausen” sung by Maria Farandouri without recalling concentration camps.
As for his “Zorba the Greek,” a soundtrack which practically defines the Greek soul for the rest of the world, it has become so laden with images of Anthony Quinn, of tourists drinking ouzo and taverna owners dancing that it is scorned by the youth as well as the working classes and so receives far less play than it deserves. “Canto General” (based on Pablo Neruda’s poem) is hard to listen to at all. In the Greece of today, a Greece which is increasingly tired of politics, even beautiful music is avoided if its stirs up too many emotions and memories. Manos’ music stirs up no such memories. His two-album collection of the best of his old songs, called characteristically “Manos Hadjidakis in the Roman Forum, 1947-1985” is still selling well, as is his “Ballad of the Senses,” which is of the same high quality as his early work. Manos’ gentle melodies are played everywhere and seem to soothe the embittered and politically torn country like a balm.
Both composers continue to be heard around the world. Mikis conducted his Romiosini to the thousands attending the opening night of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and the opening ceremonies of the Athens Olympics of 2004, supervised by Dimitris Papaioannou, played the music of both composers. Mikis was also the choice of composer by the Afghan rebels (Northern League), who would play his revolutionary music before “charging” against the Taliban.
Besides promoting new musicians, up until his death in 1994, Manos continued to compose wonderful music. Throughout his life, he appears to have remained faithful to his principles. These, though never clearly defined, could loosely be characterized as a blend of anarchism and conservatism. Perhaps this life-long consistency in his values explains why his work continues to reflect both creativity and originality.
Mikis, today in his mid 80s, continues to live with politics in his soul, as any visitor lucky enough to meet with him in the Year of our Lord 2007 will quickly testify to. But perhaps because he finds little of interest in today’s unheroic political stage, he has returned, musically speaking, to the classical efforts of his youth. In the 1980s and especially in the 1990s he revisited his symphonies, free from the need to lead the masses through his revolutionary melodies. These symphonies however, don’t fit with the image he has created for himself, and perhaps that is why one hears whispers that his best work is way behind him. His peak came in the 1960s and in the first part of the 1970s. He admits to this, partially at least, when he says that it is the political situation in Greece that is at fault for what he now composes. Where can you find Greekness (romiosini!) in the modern villas mushrooming up in the suburbs of Athens? In the corruption of politics? Current issues no longer inspire him, do not allow him the chance to dress up for battle, so to speak. The old passion that ignited his music is lying somewhere in an abandoned trash can.
About Mikis, the Greek says, “We love his music; we don’t care about his politics.” And perhaps that is the way it should be. Today he is universally accepted. His early music is still being recorded, by different musicians each time. The most famous of Greece’s singers seem eager to take a stab at singing Theodorakis, something inconceivable forty years ago. The plethora of new recordings however, no matter how interesting some of them sound, do not compare to the originals. This however does not seem to bother Mikis himself, who doesn’t seem to feel that the newer versions are in any way weaker than the first ones.
In his final years, Manos spoke of Mikis with both ironic detachment and a certain guarded jealousy. In one of his last interviews, he said:
Don’t you know Theodorakis? He wanted the people. When “the people” supporting him to go from fifty thousand to forty-nine thousand, he gathers up his things and flees to Paris, where he grows desperate and lonely; whereas I remain satisfied with my three thousand. And my three thousand will never become two thousand and nine hundred; three thousand one hundred yes.
Of course, Manos is being sarcastic when he restricts his audience to three thousand. What Greek hasn’t heard and been moved by his Ballad of the Senses, his Fifteen Vespers, and who among them does not recognize Never on Sunday?
The story of the Epitaphios has a small coda. It seems that all the guilty parties had to revisit their works at later stages in their life. They weren’t satisfied with their first taste of the poem, and that includes Ritsos himself.
Ritsos rewrote Epitaphios in 1948, twelve years after the original, as if he needed to mourn the dead son in a more personal and less political form, as if his original had not done justice to the situation. In 1953 he wrote against conscripted art in his “Goodbye, Vladimir Mayakovsky” where he said “you strangled in your own throat your most personal voice.”
Prolific as usual and unsatisfied with either Mikis’ and Manos’ versions, Mikis has already recorded a third version, sung by Mary Linda, although copies do not appear to be widely available. With Mikis’ permission, in 2004 the Greek composer Stavros Xarhakos adapted Epitaphios for himself and it was first played in front of the Prime Ministers of Europe, at the temple of Poseidon, at Sounion. Xarhakos chose as his singer Maria Soultatou, whose voice combines both the power of an opera singer with the depth of a soul singer. Gregarious, plethoric, and ravenous in his desire to produce music, Mikis once wrote that if he really had occupied himself “effectively” with Epitaphios, he could have written “dozens of versions, hunting for the ideal which would not betray the popular song but which would give it each time a new and original flavor.”
When Manos received Mikis’ composition, he too had been working on putting to music a poem entitled Epitaphios, written by another Greek poet, Varvitsiotis. In his own words:
I had barely finished comprising my Epitaphios when I received Mikis’ score. If I had produced it right after Theodorakis no one would believe it was a coincidence. Even though my music had nothing to do with Mikis’ nor was my poetry Ritsos’ poetry, all would think I wanted to copy the reputation of Theodorakis’ Epitaphios and so I put it off indefinitely.
Both Mikis and Manos cast a long shadow. Every Greek has already felt the strength of their music. They know it cannot be replaced by disco, lambada or slam-dancing. They know that the music of these two composers, like all Greek music, lives on and interprets the Greek’s deeper self. This time, the new generation of composers, besides the nine-eighth notes, the church hymnals, the Byzantine sounds, island music and secular funeral dirges, have a deeper well of genius from which to draw.
As for the Epitaphios, it now has a life of its own, separate from either Mikis or Manos. It represents the unrealized dreams and desires of the 1960s. Whenever I hear those opening notes of the bouzouki, whenever I hear Bithikotsis parched voice, I am reminded of just how much suffering this country endured in order to claim its democracy.
