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Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021)
Photo: Uncredited / picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS
“I've seen everything there is.
I'm so happy with all of this, it would be unfair to live longer «Mikis Theodorakis was right about one thing in this interview from 2017: He actually experienced everything.
He was celebrated worldwide for his music, and was valued by critics and simple listeners alike.
He lived an inconsistent, almost novel-like life, which led from exile to torture to universal love and appreciation.
Theodorakis may have been ready to leave the world happy - which happened on Thursday in a peaceful manner when he died of a heart attack at the age of 96 in his home near the Acropolis.
But Greece and the Greeks weren't.
“Today we lost part of Greece's soul.
Mikis Theodorakis, Mikis, the teacher, the intellectual, the radical, our Mikis has passed away, «said Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni, Greek President Aikaterini Sakellaropoulou interrupted a speech to address the death.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis declared a three-day period of national mourning.
Praise and honor also echoed through the Greek section of social media.
"Mikis," as everyone called him here, was a dearly loved person. A man whose music could still be heard everywhere, on television and on the radio, in concert halls and at airport counters. Perhaps he was so popular in Greece because he was a role model for many Greeks. A figure like Alexis Sorbas: unconventional and always true to himself. One who loves freedom and is openly devoted to the joys of life.
Born on the island of Chios, Mikis Theodorakis captured a passion for music at an early age.
At the age of 13 he created his first composition.
During the German-Italian occupation of Greece in World War II, he was arrested in 1942 and later tortured.
He fought in the Greek civil war that followed the defeat of the Axis powers - on the side of the communists against the loyalists.
He had to go into exile several times because of his left-wing ideologies.
Although the hardworking artist composed more than a thousand works, the best known is certainly his film music for "Alexis Sorbas" (1964);
one can doubt whether there is anyone who has never heard or danced to this melody.
Other films for which Theodorakis composed the music were "Z" (1969), Costa-Gavras' satire on the Greek military junta, and Sidney Lumet's thriller "Serpico" (1973) with Al Pacino.
But he also excelled in numerous other musical forms, from orchestral works to operas to symphonies.
When Mikis Theodorakis was in exile after the military came to power on April 21, 1967, he gave numerous concerts around the world with which he wanted to draw their attention to the death of democracy.
After the fall of the dictatorship, he returned to Greece in 1974.
However, his left roots did not prevent him from assuming a ministerial office in the conservative government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, the father of today's Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos.
Glowing patriotic
When I last saw him in person, he took part in a demonstration in February 2018, it went against a contract with Skopje on the name of Macedonia.
His sturdy 1.91-meter body now looked fragile, and he was confined to a wheelchair.
But his speech was the culmination of the protest: it was ardently patriotic, another of the many antitheses this former Marxist artist had in him.
Theodorakis was always more than just a legend.
In a country that has suffered from deep social divisions, from sharp political conflicts, he brought people together - with his music, and now with his death.
The melodies from Theodorakis' compositions can now be heard across the country - they echoed from television screens, radios, loudspeakers. People you met on the street were numb, some cried. “It feels like all the great Greeks are leaving, one at a time. We have become orphans, ”Niki Vasilopoulou, 56, told SPIEGEL, while in the café she could not take her eyes off the screen on which the report was reported. Friends, relatives, neighbors, but also simply the population gathered in front of his property to commemorate Mikis Theodorakis.
Xeni Baloti, a historian trained at the Sorbonne, a close friend of Theodorakis and the author of a biography of the composer, met him at an early age. Her mother played for her the then forbidden pieces during the time of the military dictatorship. She told SPIEGEL: “I met him in the summer of 1974, after the junta was overthrown. He asked if I wanted to help create a new world - not an ideal one, but a creative one «. And further: "He was a simple man, with a sense of humor, he was polite."
Perhaps one could put it this way: The balm on the ideological wounds that Theodorakis distributed was the right legacy of a great Greek for his compatriots - in these turbulent, harsh, divided times for a nation that Theodorakis always tried to serve, and with it Dividing lines and party lines ignored. He himself once said: “I'm not a communist or a social democrat or anything else. I am a free man. "