Manos Hadjidakis

Often rendered in English as Manos Hadjidakis, this figure ranks among modern Greece’s preeminent composers and songwriters, standing alongside Mikis Theodorakis as the chief claimant to that distinction. In the years after World War II he helped initiate a fresh chapter in Greek music by raising earthy forms of folk and popular song to the status of recognized art. Along the way he enjoyed enormous domestic popularity, above all as a creator of pop songs, while international listeners came to know him through film scores that brought him an Academy Award in 1960. He also produced contemporary classical works for both modest and expansive ensembles, frequently drawing on Greek poetry, and supplied music for theater and ballet. A great many of his songs, extended compositions, and recordings are now regarded as classics within Greece and as foundational pillars of the nation’s modern popular music. Until his death in 1994 he continued to be esteemed as a leading intellectual and cultural presence in the country.

Hadjidakis entered the world on 23 October 1925 in the northern Greek town of Xanthi. Piano lessons began at age four, soon followed by study of the violin and accordion. After his parents divorced in 1932 he relocated with his mother to Athens; his father perished in a plane crash in 1938, plunging the household into severe financial straits that the German occupation during World War II only deepened. While holding a series of menial positions to sustain his family, the teenager pursued advanced instruction in music theory and composition and briefly attended the University of Athens for philosophy, though circumstances blocked completion of the degree. In 1943 he encountered the celebrated surrealist poet Nikos Gatsos, who became his preferred lyricist and collaborated on the great majority of his vocal works.

An early outlet for his compositional gifts appeared when he joined forces with the Art Theatre of Athens, supplying music for its 1944 staging of Alexis Solomos’ The Last White Crow. He remained with the company for the next fifteen years, scoring numerous landmark plays by American and European dramatists, and from the early 1950s onward he performed similar duties for the Greek National Theatre. His first film score, for Free Slaves, dates to 1946; the next year he issued his initial contemporary piano piece, For a Small White Seashell. In 1948 he delivered a widely noticed lecture championing rembetika—the urban lower-class folk song idiom then viewed by conservative circles as nearly scandalous—which provoked outrage among the musical establishment yet charted the course that would secure his place among Greece’s most treasured musical figures.

As a composer he incorporated rembetika into the 1951 piano suite Six Folklore Paintings, recasting its melodies in a more polished form; the work also served as the basis for one of four ballets he created between 1949 and 1957. During the same period he began writing for theatrical productions of ancient Greek tragedies, commencing with Aeschylus’ Orestes trilogy in 1950—an assignment traditionally assigned to academic specialists. He finished one of his principal modern classical scores, the song cycle The C.N.S. Cycle for piano and baritone, in 1954. The following year he provided the soundtrack for the film Stella, which became one of his major cinematic successes. Actress Melina Mercouri, whom he had met through theater circles, performed the vocal numbers and emerged as one of his most sympathetic interpreters.

Beginning in 1959 he supplied songs on a regular basis to the rising singer Nana Mouskouri; he also helped bring Mikis Theodorakis before Greek audiences by arranging the song “Epitaphios” for one of her recording sessions. The next year he again collaborated with Mercouri on Jules Dassin’s film Never on Sunday. That international breakthrough earned Hadjidakis an Oscar for the title song, which achieved widespread success abroad. In 1962 he mounted the provocative musical Street of Dreams, later recognized as a landmark of Greek theater for its candid themes, and completed revisions on his score for Aristophanes’ Birds, now counted among his finest achievements.

Two further internationally visible film scores followed—America, America (1963) for Elia Kazan and Topkapi (1964) for Jules Dassin—while a sustained partnership developed with choreographer Maurice Béjart of 20th Century Ballets. Hadjidakis established the Athens Experimental Orchestra in 1964, offering a platform for his own music and that of avant-garde Greek composers such as Iannis Xenakis. Even as his engagement with experimental idioms deepened, his fascination with song form persisted; the 1965 work Mythology ranged widely across traditional songwriting, blending symphonic, Turkish Byzantine, and ancient Greek elements with contemporary rembetika.

In 1966 he journeyed to New York for the Broadway opening of Illya Darling, the stage adaptation of Never on Sunday. He remained in the United States until 1972, partly to avoid the repressive military junta then governing Greece. While abroad he completed several major works, among them the piano piece Rhythmology and the song cycle Magnus Eroticus, which set twelve Greek poems—ancient and modern—to music; still drawn to popular song, he also recorded the album Reflections with the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble.

Hadjidakis returned to Greece in 1972. After the fall of the dictatorship he assumed several prominent cultural posts, including direction of the State Orchestra (until 1981) and of the classical channel of national radio (1982), as well as the deputy directorship of the national opera (until 1977). In the late 1970s and early 1980s he launched a series of music festivals and competitions; in 1985 he founded his own record label, Sirius, and a cultural magazine. In 1989 he established and led the Orchestra of Colours, a symphonic ensemble dedicated to unconventional repertoire. Heart ailments, which had long troubled him, ultimately caused his death on 15 June 1994.