Theodorakis - Myth & Politics in Modern Greek Music

Gail Holst

Holst G., Theodorakis – Myth & Politics in Modern Greek Music, Adolf M.Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1979.
Language | English.

As well as being a poet, G. Holst-Warhaft has been a journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, academic, musician, and translator. In the 1970’s, she performed with Mikis Theodorakis.

Her book is a detailed study of his music and of the complex interrelationship between his music and Greek society and politics, including key references to his main interpreters such as Maria Farantouri.

Maria Farantouri’s voice was something else. It was not only a great voice by any standards; it was unsentimental, and yet strongly emotional. It could move an audience without appearing to appeal them. It was warm, low, female, without sensuality. Theodorakis recognised the potential of such a voice when he first heard Farantouri sing. She was seventeen years old. For the next decade much of his music was composed with the specific potential of Farantouri’s voice in mind.
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Holst Warhaft G., Theodorakis – Myth & Politics in Modern Greek Music, 2nd ed. revised, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2023.
Language: English.

In this second revised and enlarged edition, incorporating musical material from the intervening decades since the first, G. Holst refers, among other albums, to the Odyssey, the last cycle of songs composed by Theodorakis set to lyrics by Kostas Kartelias.

Sung by another voice, the softer arrangements and orchestration on the album might have made the songs excessively sweet, but Farandouri, as so often in the later albums of Theodorakis, has provided a gravitas that transports the songs to a deeper and more Greek realm. The song ‘the God Eros’, for example, sounds like a song you’d expect to hear in an old Manhattan piano bar, but listen to the voice and the words, and there is no doubt where we are – in a music poetic-world where the sweet is always tinged with bitterness and the bitter can always be made sweet.