His ballet Antigone was performed at the Covent Garden in London to critical acclaim. He composed scores for Michael Powell’s films Ill Met by Moonlight (aka Night Ambush, 1957) and Honeymoon (1959) the latter featured the “ Honeymoon Song”, a famous piece which has by then been reprised by many artists including the Beatles. Theodorakis was becoming increasingly famous on an international level. Theodorakis with orchestra and singer Maria Farantouri, Netehrlands, 1972 (photo by Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, from the National Archives of the Netherlands, via Wikimedia Commons) At the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, he was awarded the Gold Medal by a Jury chaired by Dmitri Shostakovich. There he composed music for ballet and cinema scores. The following year, together with his wife, he left for France under a state scholarship, to study at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1953 he married Myrto Altinoglou, with whom he would have two children. In 1950, after the civil war had ended, he was finally able to graduate from the Athens Conservatoire. He continued to write music in exile -including his first symphony- inspired by his own suffering, while his experiences were also evident in many of his works later. During the Greek Civil War, along with other communists, he was arrested, and sent into exile on the island of Icaria and later Makronisos, where again he was tortured. At the same time, he became a member of a Reserve Unit of the Greek People's Liberation Army ( ELAS), and took part in the Dekemvriana clashes. In that same year he also published his first collection of poems under a pen name, and joined the resistance against the occupying Axis forces.Īfter having been arrested and tortured by the Nazis, he left for Athens in 1943 and enrolled at the Athens Conservatoire to study composition. He later received music lessons and gave his first concert in Tripoli, at the age of seventeen, presenting his troparion of Kassiani for a cappella quartet. His passion for music manifested at an early age and he taught himself to write music, without having access to instruments. Theodorakis was born on 29 July 1925 on the Greek island of Chios and spent his childhood in different cities around Greece. Few people have been as closely associated internationally with contemporary Greek music as Mikis Theodorakis, a man famous not just for his diverse body of work but also for his active involvement in Greece’s political and social struggles during the second half of the 20th century.
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