The Politico-Musical Activity of Nikos Skalkottas and Alekos Xenos

The period following Nikos Skalkottas’s return to Greece in 1933, after he had completed his music studies in Germany, was marked by his increased focus on composing more accessible tonal works. This focus coincided with a turbulent political climate, encompassing the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–41, also known as the 4th of August Regime, referring to the date it began), the Greco-Italian War (1940–41), the Nazi occupation (1941–44) (during which Skalkottas was briefly interned at a concentration camp), and the subsequent Civil War.Footnote ⁷ These seismic events played a crucial role in shaping the cultural landscape. While practical motivations for this turn towards tonality have been discussed by scholars, such as Skalkottas’s biographer Eva Mantzourani, evidence also suggests that amid these sociopolitical upheavals, his efforts to establish a more accessible musical style reflected the impact of socialist realism, particularly as it related to Greek anti-fascist mobilization.Footnote ⁸

Skalkottas’s writings, found in a series of undated and unpublished essays, some likely intended for the progressive literary journal Neoelliniká Grámmata [Neohellenic Letters], reveal his artistic concerns as aligned with the principles of socialist realism.Footnote ⁹ So too does his composition of programmatic works — now lost — composed during his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, as well as his 1947 Classical Symphony, his final major work which is accompanied by an extensive programme note. The note anchors the symphony’s engagement with classical form, tonal musical language, and accessible features within the scope of socialist realism, whose promulgation in Greece promoted these very qualities in relation to the role of artists in the prevailing anti-fascist struggle.Footnote ¹⁰ The Classical Symphony, when considered alongside its extensive programme note and compared with the works of Skalkottas’s contemporaries and the repertoire of official musical life, can be connected to Xenos’s politico-musical activities. Xenos’s compositions, which are associated with the Greek resistance movement, represent the closest approximation to an official Greek socialist realist music. Indeed, Skalkottas’s programme note, which emphasizes themes of freedom, liberation, and victory, rhetorically situates the symphony within the spirit of this resistance.

Xenos, who completed his studies in 1939, worked in the Symphony Orchestra of the Athens Conservatoire, as well as in the Radio and Lyric orchestras. At the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in 1940, he joined the military music branch of the Greek army as first trombone, and he began composing his first symphonic work, entitled Freedom Overture, inspired by the ‘resistance of the Greek people against the occupiers’.Footnote ¹¹ In 1941, he became a representative of the intellectual-artistic branch of the largest resistance organization, known as EAM (Ethnikó Apeleftherotikó Métopo, the National Liberation Front) and continued composing andártika and symphonic works that engaged with the sociopolitical climate.

Andártika, resembling Soviet mass songs of the 1930s, embody the socialist realist qualities favoured by cultural officials in the Soviet Union. Composed by professional and amateur musicians within the resistance, these songs were designed to foster solidarity, patriotism, and unity, blending established revolutionary musical codes with accessible melodies and uplifting lyrics that reflected EAM’s mission to galvanize and to promote unity. The original tunes composed by EAM propagandists and combatants share certain musical similarities with songs that were adopted from abroad; indeed, Greek authors borrowed from a history of established musical codes associated with resistance and revolutionary songs. These include a march rhythm (often with upbeats resulting in an emphasis on the first beat and the associated 2/4 or 4/4 metre), rudimentary harmonic progressions (such as the popular and predictable progressions in western music, e.g. tonic–subdominant–dominant–tonic), diatonicism, the repetition and variation of a small number of musical ideas, an absence of contrapuntal complexity, melodies contained within a limited vocal range, and basic transpositions of the melody (such as an octave above). These features do not function to imbue the music with a distinct Greek national character; instead, they create the impression of a generic musical style, thereby sonically situating the Greek struggle within a transnational history of musicalized resistance and revolution. While the andártika spread through oral traditions rather than state sponsorship, they share crucial and characteristic features with Soviet mass songs, particularly in their ‘optimistic humanitarian and positive lyrics and accessible tunes’.Footnote ¹²

Xenos subtitled his Symphony no. 1 ‘The Resistance’ (1944–46), referring to the lives and struggles of the guerrilla fighters in the mountainous regions of northern Greece, where much of the hand-to-hand combat took place; he based the three movements on three emblematic andártika. In both a political and an aesthetic sense, the narrative symphony, concerning the Greek resistance against Nazi occupation, epitomizes the qualities of ‘heroic classicism’ characteristic of socialist realist symphonies.Footnote ¹³ Though it remains unclear to what extent Skalkottas shared Xenos’s communist ideology, their music was partly shaped by encounters with socialist discourse, Soviet cultural politics, and socialist realism, which gained traction among Greece’s cultural left in the context of the anti-fascist struggle. While the impact of these ideas was initially limited by the conditions of the 1930s and 1940s, they gained broader acceptance in the 1950s and 1960s through the rise of art-popular song — a genre that adapted to the repression and censorship of Greece’s post-war and pre-dictatorship era. Despite some heterogeneity within the Greek National School and Skalkottas’s occasional alignment with its principles, as seen in his tonal, folk-inspired Greek Dances, both Skalkottas and Xenos remained marginal figures. Their politico-musical activity and the popular yet controversial styles of rebetiko and andártika with which they respectively associated themselves in the 1940s, as well as Skalkottas’s introverted temperament and Xenos’s avowed communism, likely collectively contributed to their alienation from the musical mainstream.Footnote ¹⁴

Elli Charamis notes that during this period, Greek radio broadcasting, dominated by the political and economic elite, was not conducive to promoting the works of Skalkottas or Xenos:

Although Skalkottas and Xenos remained oppositional figures within Greek musical culture in the 1930s and 1940s, their oeuvres represent key politico-musical developments that were not fully embraced during their careers. These ideals later found underacknowledged expression in the development of art-popular song, which played a crucial role in shaping Greece’s musical landscape. While it is beyond the scope of this article to explore in extensive detail the ways in which sociopolitical concerns resonated in Skalkottas’s and Xenos’s work, the brief introduction above aims to provide the necessary foundation for embedding art-popular song within a broader musical lineage of Greek composers — a lineage largely absent from anglophone scholarship.

By emphasizing the intersections between the politico-musical ideals outlined earlier and the later development of art-popular song, the gap between mid-century musical practices and the sociopolitical forces that shaped them can be bridged, paving the way for more nuanced and comprehensive anglophone scholarship on Greek music. As a starting point I consider Theodorakis’s commitment to crafting music for the ‘Greek People’ that was accessible, inclusive, and edifying, with the ability to engage the masses in political life and raise their cultural level.Footnote ¹⁶ This commitment is encapsulated in the term art-popular itself, which linguistically bridges the axiological gap between high and low culture rooted in the philosophical traditions of the Frankfurt School and its contemporary repercussions.Footnote ¹⁷ Theodorakis’s requirement, as Yannis Zaimakis writes, was thus for a ‘Leftist policy in the field of popular music’.Footnote ¹⁸ Embodying the Gramscian notion of popular culture that would appeal to the masses with a ‘national point of view’ in the aftermath of fascism, art-popular song was therefore based on ‘an amalgam of patriotic and Marxist arguments’ and oriented towards gearing the masses ‘to the goals of the socialist vision’.Footnote ¹⁹

Theodorakis and the Soviet Union

Art-popular song reflects a cultural-political agenda rooted in the legacy of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in shaping Theodorakis’s political and aesthetic positions, as well as providing him with practical support by promoting his works and facilitating his travel to Soviet cities throughout his career. For example, at the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, the jury, chaired by Shostakovich, awarded Theodorakis the Gold Medal for his Suite no. 1 for Piano and Orchestra. In 1966, Theodorakis was invited to perform a series of concerts in several cities across the Soviet Union, and in the same year the Soviet record company Melodiya published a selection of his songs recorded in Moscow. In 1970, following his release from a twenty-month political detention in Greece, Theodorakis was welcomed back to Moscow by members of the Union of Soviet Composers, and in 1983 he was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize. In 2007, at a ceremony held at the Russian embassy in Athens, he was honoured with the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation, and in 2020 Vladimir Putin issued a decree awarding the composer a medal commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ‘victory in the Great Patriotic War’.Footnote ²⁰

The response of Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, in a briefing to Russian journalists and foreign correspondents on the news of Theodorakis’s death, is representative of the composer’s reciprocal relationship with Russia:

The relationship between Theodorakis and Russia is emphasized in the statement of condolence from the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to his Greek counterpart:

These references to the relationship between Theodorakis and the Soviet Union and Russian Federation attest to the country’s continued structural investment in cultural diplomacy in the decades after the war. Despite the resistance of the Greek government, under Konstantinos Karamanlis, to developing cultural relations with Moscow in the context of intensifying anti-communism, the USSR’s investment in culture, channelled through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs for example, retained some power and influence. This support extended to encouraging and promoting Greek artists and intellectuals who expressed solidarity with the Soviet Union and the politicized development of Soviet culture.Footnote ²³ For example, while constituting an exception rather than a rule, the Greek government accepted the majority of the eleven proposals of the 1962 ‘USSR–Greece Cultural and Scientific Cooperation Plan’ proposed by the Soviet government on 30 March 1962.Footnote ²⁴

The agenda of art-popular song was fuelled by Theodorakis’s communism and his relationship with the Soviet Union, qualities which set him apart from the composer Manos Hadjidakis, who also helped define the art-popular song genre but was not politically engaged. While there could not, according to Theodorakis, be ‘communist principles in art’, his art-popular song was ideologically grounded in the social, cultural, and political principles of socialist realism.Footnote ²⁵ As Samson writes, he was ‘not just politically committed to the Marxist left; he had political ambitions and indeed a political career’, and these politics were channelled into his art-popular songs, which ‘substituted for a possible socialist popular music’.Footnote ²⁶ Despite his criticism of the Soviet Union and a political career involving affiliations with various political parties, including the Greek centre-right New Democracy party, a few years before his death Theodorakis elucidated his stance in a political testament sent to the general secretary of the KKE (Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas, Greek Communist Party):

The Social and Political Inheritance of Art-Popular Song

Theodorakis’s affinity for the Soviet Union took shape during his involvement in the national resistance and the subsequent Civil War. In the context of the Second World War, the Allied nations had vested hopes in the Soviet military war effort. Further to this, the dire wartime conditions in Greece and intensifying political disaffection after its liberation facilitated an orientation towards the left, whereby the Soviet Union and its institution of socialism came to be seen in favourable terms. In Theodorakis’s words: ‘the Soviet Union […] especially during the years of the national resistance and the Civil War, was an ideological beacon and our great hope in the harsh conditions of struggles and trials’.Footnote ²⁸ If we are to conceive of a continuity between art-popular song and the work of Skalkottas and Xenos, it is paramount to develop a richer understanding of the social and political landscape of post-war Greece, which helped to shape Theodorakis’s musical agenda. Mapping this historical context helps to elucidate how art-popular song inherited social, cultural, and political concerns that had arisen for composers during the earlier wartime and resistance periods.

The seed that was to grow into the Greek Civil War had already taken root during the last stages of German occupation, in the bitter opposition between resistance organizations: primarily EAM and ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós, the Greek People’s Liberation Army) on the one hand, and EDES (Ethnikós Dimokratikós Ellinikós Sýndesmos, the National Republican Greek League), its military wing EOEA (Ethnikés Omádes Ellínon Antartón, the National Groups of Greek Guerrillas), and forces aligned with the government on the other. The Caserta Agreement, signed on 26 September 1944 shortly before the liberation of mainland Greece from the Nazis in early October, involved the exiled Greek government of Georgios Papandreou, the British Command, EAM and ELAS, and EDES. According to this agreement, collaborationist forces would be duly tried and punished, and all resistance forces would be united in a new Greek army and post-war government. This government would come under the control of the British, who arrived in Athens on 18 October for its installation and in preparation for the restoration of the monarchy. However, Papandreou failed in his attempts to enact the agreement and appease the various resistance forces with mutually acceptable terms for a new united National Army and its leadership, among other things. Frustration across EAM and ELAS escalated as they were ordered to surrender their arms, while the collaborationist forces were not. Eventually, negotiations on this post-war government fell apart, and, fuelled by British foreign policy, savage internecine fighting erupted across Athens during the Dekemvrianá.

Vehement anti-communism motivated British support for the Greek National Army and far-right groups in their persecution of the leftist forces that had been critical in the liberation struggle. The anti-communism at the heart of British motivations is evidenced in Churchill’s War Cabinet papers and other documents, including a ‘personal and top secret’ memo from as early as 17 August 1944, addressed to Franklin D. Roosevelt:

After liberation, British policy in Greece therefore became oriented towards ‘neutralising or destroying all EAM-ELAS bands approaching the city’, in Churchill’s words in a telegram to British Army officer General Scobie dated 5 December 1944.Footnote ³⁰ Churchill goes on to add more specific and revealing instructions:

A special edition of the state-controlled newspaper I Ellás [Hellas] published the following day includes another statement from Churchill that reflects this representation of EAM and ELAS as a communist ‘local rebellion’. Under the heading ‘Mr Churchill Unreservedly Condemns the Attempt of the Communists to Cause Bloodshed in Greece’, Churchill remarks that EAM ‘are using the weapons we gave them for the war against the Germans to impose a communist dictatorship. — We have made the decision to enforce law and order. — Mr Scobie has full authorization.’Footnote ³²

Despite such scaremongering about the ‘communist extremism’ of EAM and ELAS and their supposed links with the Soviet Union throughout the resistance, including the claim that they were plotting a Bolshevik-style revolution in Greece, there were no such alliances with the Soviet Union. For example, according to Manolis Glezos, the politician, journalist, and author best remembered for his participation in the resistance and his role in removing the Nazi flag from atop the Parthenon in 1941, there was ‘no plot to take over Athens as Churchill always maintained’.Footnote ³³ Indeed, in accordance with the informal ‘Percentages agreement’ made between Stalin and Churchill situating Greece within British jurisdiction, there was no practical Soviet support for the leftist forces during the Dekemvrianá. Culminating with the defeat of EAM and ELAS, the Dekemvrianá signalled the demise of these organizations, and they were subsequently ordered to disarm under the terms of the controversial Varkiza Peace Agreement. The leaders of EAM and ELAS agreed to surrender their weapons on condition that, as the agreement stipulated, they would be represented in subsequent political dialogue and decision-making. However, the terms of the treaty were not upheld, leading to a period of dramatic violence. The so-called ‘White Terror’ ensued in 1945 and 1946, during which those suspected of participating in or aiding EAM and ELAS were rounded up by the British forces and former collaborationists they had recruited. Detainees were sent to Gulag-style forced labour camps on islands, where torture and murder were commonplace. On the mainland, thousands were executed, usually in public, and severed heads or hanging bodies were routinely exhibited in the town squares. In rhetoric that is typical of British colonialist discourse, His Majesty’s Embassy in Athens remarked that this exhibition of severed heads ‘is a regular custom in this country which cannot be judged by western European standards’.Footnote ³⁴

The civil conflict had taken on an increasingly political dimension with the establishment of the communist-dominated Democratic Army of Greece. Most of its members were formerly part of ELAS, leading to their intensified persecution on ideological grounds. Indeed, according to EAM sources, within just one month of the Varkiza Agreement, 1192 people were killed, 159 women were raped, 6413 people were injured, and 551 offices and printing shops were raided.Footnote ³⁵ From 1946, the Civil War entered its final stage, and the scale of fighting escalated dramatically in 1947, with both sides suffering significant setbacks and casualties. Ultimately, government forces won out, aided by a catastrophic defeat for the Democratic Army of Greece in the summer of 1948. In the wake of the Civil War, Greece faced economic and social devastation, deprivation, and critically damaged infrastructure, particularly in areas where fighting had taken place. Greek political leadership went through a series of hands, with elections held in 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1956. David H. Close summarizes the complex ‘interlocking system of power’ that characterized Greek politics after the general elections in March 1950, which led to four successive governments within six years:

The chasm between left and right widened, and the progressive repression and persecution of the left and those involved, or suspected to have been involved, in leftist groups during the resistance, the Dekemvrianá, and the Civil War persisted. Thousands continued to be imprisoned or exiled on various prison islands, including Makronisos, where a programme of ‘re-indoctrination’ was implemented under conditions of unscrupulous violence and terror.Footnote ³⁷ As Polymeris Voglis writes, prisoners were subject to ‘rehabilitation through […] enlightenment and education’, which took the form of forced labour, torture, and pervasive anti-communist propaganda.Footnote ³⁸ After undergoing interrogation and often torture regarding their involvement with or knowledge of organizations such EAM, ELAS, or EPON (Eniaía Panelladikí Orgánosi Néoni, the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth), detainees were made to renounce communism and proclaim their loyalty to Greece — communism was deemed incompatible with patriotism. A magazine published on the island described this process as ‘taking the red poison out’, making the prisoner ‘ready to receive tonic national injections’.Footnote ³⁹ As part of their repentance and moral and ideological transformation into enlightened patriotic soldiers, prisoners were enlisted for hard labour to build roads and other infrastructure, and even to make imitations of classical Greek sculptures, including the Parthenon. Indeed, as Voglis highlights, ‘the content of the rehabilitation […] combined fierce anticommunism and nationalism. Communism was identified with the expansive aspirations of neighbouring countries (the “Slavs”), and nationalism with the defence of the country.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Notwithstanding the persecution and the risk of exile and imprisonment, and despite the fact that the KKE had been banned in 1947 under Law 509, the party maintained its appeal, particularly to the ‘masses of poor workers, shopkeepers, clerical workers and farmers, who resented social inequality and bureaucratic corruption’.Footnote ⁴¹ Motivated by fears of the KKE’s continued appeal, and in attempts to restrict Soviet social, cultural, and political influence in the region, successive Greek governments, supported by the British forces, recruited the police and military as well as former Nazi collaborationists in the anti-communist crusade. As Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith write, ‘nowhere else in newly liberated Europe were Nazi sympathizers enabled to penetrate the state structure — the army, security forces, judiciary — so effectively’.Footnote ⁴² A statement issued by the former prime ministers Emmanuel Tsouderos and Nikolaos Plastiras, along with other politicians who were more liberal and republican, on 5 June 1945 described the strategy of recruiting collaborationists against members of the resistance:

Writing in 2014, before the conviction in 2020 of the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn as a criminal organization, Vulliamy and Smith highlight that the ‘resurgence of neo-fascism in the form of […] far-right party Golden Dawn has direct links to the failure to purge the state of right-wing extremists’ during this crucial post-war period.Footnote ⁴⁴

In terms of post-war recovery and reconstruction, as a result of the Truman Doctrine implemented in 1947, ‘Greece turned into the largest beneficiary per capita of American largesse in the world, receiving more than $3 billion in military and economic assistance by 1963’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Tsagkarakis elaborates that in the Cold War period, the US ‘educational and cultural aid package was proportionally one of the largest of its kind ever given to a European country’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Greece therefore came increasingly under American influence and control. From within this turbulent political landscape, and against the backdrop of significant foreign intervention, Theodorakis helped to shape the genre and cultural politics of art-popular song.

Epitafios as a Representative Work of Art-Popular Song’s Cultural-Political Agenda

Theodorakis moved to Athens in 1943 and commenced studies at the Athens Conservatoire. He joined ELAS shortly thereafter and played an active role in the Dekemvrianá. During the Greek Civil War, he was arrested and exiled to the prisons on the islands of Psitalia and Ikaria, and later to Makronisos, where he was tortured.Footnote ⁴⁷ Owing to family connections, he was discharged from Makronisos and left the island for Crete. During the time Theodorakis spent recovering, he began writing and publishing articles pertaining to Greek music, condemning the existing musical establishment and the entrenched division between high and low art. After being obliged to return to the Greek army to complete his mandatory service in 1950, Theodorakis graduated from the Athens Conservatoire the same year; following his graduation, he worked as a journalist, continuing to produce critiques of the Greek musical establishment and its failure to produce an ‘authentic’ national Greek music.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1954, he moved to Paris to continue his music studies under the tutelage of Olivier Messiaen and Eugène Bigot.

Between 1958 and 1959, Theodorakis composed the song cycle Epitafios [Lamentation], which was premiered in Athens in 1959.Footnote ⁴⁹ With its combination and appropriation of key aesthetic elements of rebetiko (the bouzouki, the rough and heady voice of the Greek folk singer Grigoris Bithikotsis), Byzantine song traditions (modes, plainsong), and texts engaging with social and political reality, Epitafios self-consciously presented a radical blueprint for modern Greek works. Theodorakis returned to Greece from his studies in Paris in 1960, coinciding with the publication of a manifesto entitled ‘A Draft Plan for the Reorganization of Greek Music’ in the journal Kritiké [Criticism]. Apart from Theodorakis, the manifesto was signed by Iannis Xenakis and other eminent musical figures. ‘Most sectors of [Greek] musical life are seriously ailing’, according to the manifesto, which called for the ‘revitalization of music in Greece’ through the reorganization of music education, the establishment of independent symphony orchestras, the extension of tours of existing symphony orchestras, and the study of Greek church and popular music, among other things.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the face of a hostile establishment, Theodorakis set out to realize, as George Giannaris writes, ‘the various propositions of the Manifesto on his own’.Footnote ⁵¹ Embodying the Gramscian notion of popular culture that would appeal to the masses with a ‘national point of view’ in the aftermath of fascism, Epitafios became a representative work of art-popular song as a musico-cultural watershed.Footnote ⁵² In Theodorakis’s words, it represented an ‘Art of the Masses’ after which ‘a new road opened’ for Greek music.Footnote ⁵³ If art-popular song is to be (re)cast as the culmination of earlier aesthetic and theoretical concerns pertaining to the political possibilities and the role and function of music in society, its characteristic features and reception warrant greater scrutiny.

Epitafios is a setting of a poem of the same name by the left-wing poet and activist Yiannis Ritsos. The work commemorates the 1936 massacre of unarmed protesting factory workers in Thessaloniki, and its creation was inspired by a photograph of the event Ritsos saw published in a newspaper article, of a mother mourning her murdered son. Against the backdrop of the collapse of the ‘Great Idea’, and alongside other left-wing intellectuals of the ‘generation of the ’30s’, Ritsos shared a sense of moral obligation to create art that would, as Gail Holst-Warhaft puts it, bear ‘witness to the social injustice and gross brutality of recent Greek history and at the same time communicate with its victims’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Just a few days after the massacre, parts of the poem appeared in the communist newspaper Rizospástis [Radical]; only two months later, the complete poem, dedicated to the ‘heroic workers’ [‘ηρωϊκούς εργάτες’] of Thessaloniki, was published in its entirety and sold by a KKE-run bookshop.Footnote ⁵⁵ Within a few days of its release, 9750 copies of the 10,000 copies printed had been sold — an unprecedentedly high number for the time. The remaining 250 copies were, along with Soviet political pamphlets, burned at the Temple of Olympian Zeus by the Metaxas regime.Footnote ⁵⁶ Despite these attempts at censorship, Epitafios, a work that directly responded to the climate of fear and repression during the Metaxas period, had entered the popular imagination.

Theodorakis admired Ritsos, closely identifying with his work, which was ‘deeply committed to the cause of the Left’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Likewise, Ritsos took a close interest in Theodorakis’s music. When Epitafios was republished in 1958, he sent a copy to Theodorakis, who became immediately compelled to set the work to music and composed a cycle of eight songs based on the poem. These were first orchestrated by Hadjidakis, a more established and popular composer at the time, and were performed by the singer Nana Mouskouri. Theodorakis, however, took issue with his contemporaries’ orchestration and performance, deeming that it gave the work an unwarranted ‘romantic’ and ‘feminine’ character.Footnote ⁵⁸ The composer later made his own orchestration, which prominently featured the bouzouki; it was performed by Manolis Chiotis, and the songs were sung by Grigoris Bithikotsis. It was primarily these two aesthetic choices, made to better suit Theodorakis’s perception of the work’s ‘austerity’, that set it apart from Hadjidakis’s version. The bouzouki was the central instrument of rebetiko, and Bithikotsis’s tone, style, and diction were strongly associated with the genre. Both changes therefore crucially evoked the rebetiko song tradition, which Theodorakis fiercely promoted. He believed that rebetika had enormous potential for his overarching mission of crafting a popular, genuine Greek style of music. By disassociating the genre from Anatolian influences, reducing its associations with illegality and a semi-criminal subculture (a process that had been set into motion earlier by Vassilis Tsitsanis), and aligning it with western art music conventions, rebetiko could assume a new identity as the authentic, popular music of the politically engaged working classes.Footnote ⁵⁹ It could, in Theodorakis’s words, ‘mirror the life and feeling of working people’, capturing the ‘love, torment, and valor of the proletariat in urban centers’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Defending the prominence of the bouzouki in his orchestration of Epitafios, Theodorakis cited its quintessentially national character and significance:

With regard to his collaboration with Bithikotsis, Theodorakis emphasized the singer’s connection with his milieu, which enabled him to connect with and communicate to his compatriots, thereby transforming music into ‘true popular song’. He said that he chose Bithikotsis

The title of Theodorakis’s work, drawn from Ritsos’s original, borrows from the Greek Orthodox tradition of the Epitáphios Thrēnos, the Lamentation upon the Grave from the Good Friday service. Indeed, the poem invokes themes of mourning and resurrection. In this vein, and again in the pursuit of a national music rooted in earlier and familiar traditions, Theodorakis based several melodies in Epitafios on Byzantine chant. In his monograph Music for the Masses, he illustrates the connection between the introductory melody of the first song (played on the bouzouki) and a Byzantine prototype, for example.Footnote ⁶³ Incorporating rebetiko and Byzantine aesthetic markers as familiar and defining features of Greek culture helped to satisfy Theodorakis’s mission for ‘unmediated, direct contact between the artist and the people’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This, in turn, contributed to his image as a ‘composer-as-national-leader’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The use of recognizable features of Greek folk song, such as the 9/8 zeibekiko rhythm that features in four songs in the cycle (‘Méra Magioú Mou Mísepses’ [‘A Day in May’], ‘Vasílepses Astéri Mou’ [‘My Star You Have Set’], ‘Nácha T’ Athánato Neró’ [‘The Water of Life’], and ‘Glyké Mou Sy Den Cháthikes’ [‘My Sweet, You Are Not Lost’]), and the nisiotiko style (folk music associated broadly with the Greek islands) of the melody of ‘Sto Parathýri Stekósoun’ [‘You Stood at the Window’], for example, would have further promoted the work’s Greekness and popular nature.Footnote ⁶⁶

Another element that was key to Epitafios’s national-popular aspirations was its strong political message, facilitated through the musical setting of Ritsos’s poem. Greek audiences were drawn into the work through familiarity with the text, which was ‘inspiring and politically relevant to the conditions of the time’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Theodorakis would continue to set canonical Greek poetry, referred to with the term melopoiimene poiise (poetry set to music), to imbue his music with political and social relevance; this served to bring poetry back ‘to the roots’, ‘to the people’, and ‘to the masses’.Footnote ⁶⁸

In its synthesis of opposing aesthetic elements and with its self-conscious political-cultural agenda, art-popular song ‘changed the course of Greek music forever’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As a communist composer, Theodorakis’s rehabilitation of rebetiko presented a crisis for the Greek left, who remained persistently divided as to whether the genre could escape from its unsavoury associations to be regarded as a national, authentic, and popular music. Xenos was one of the most vocal critics of rebetiko, bringing him in direct opposition to Theodorakis. Nevertheless, both composers shared a political orientation that informed their common pursuit for a national popular music that could express the proletariat. Indeed, for all the innovations and impact of art-popular song, many of its aesthetic and theoretical values are rooted in the musical thought of the 1940s, during which time, as Theodorakis acknowledges, ‘all at once, everything changed’. He wrote that ‘the people became charged with history. The psyche was tested as steel is tested with flame’ and that ‘there needed to emerge a [musical] outlet’.Footnote ⁷⁰ While the concerns that emerged during the 1940s were realized in art-popular song, it is important to recognize how the seeds of Theodorakis’s cultural-political agenda can be traced back to the musical thought and practice of the Greek wartime and resistance.

Art-Popular Song as the Afterlife of Greek Wartime and Resistance Music-Making

The collective sonic experience of andártika resonated in the popular politics and demotic orientation of art-popular song. While they responded to different social and political conditions and requirements, both andártika and art-popular song sought to communicate in an accessible and inclusive aesthetic language. Both types of music sought to appeal widely across various social and political groups, linking individuals in a common musical experience for the creation of a new collective identity, whether this was anti-fascist, with regard to andártika’s popular politics of resistance, or national/cultural, as in Theodorakis’s self-fashioning of art-popular song as genuine modern Greek national music.

Furthermore, the inextricable union of music and text in works aspiring to national significance, characteristic of art-popular song, was rooted in earlier traditions, most notably in Nikolaos Mantzaros’s nineteenth-century musical settings of the poetry of Dionysios Solomos. This union was, however, more closely temporally related to andártika, for which socially and politically relevant texts were also a crucial point of reference and inspiration. Andártika remained popular for more than a decade after the resistance, despite periods of censorship and surveillance, and continue to resonate powerfully in political contexts. Despite the different political, social, and cultural backdrops, themes of unity, patriotism, heroism, and struggle figured prominently in both andártika and art-popular song. Alongside its composer’s commitment to fostering national cohesion, art-popular song also hinged on the principles of proletarian internationalism; in this sense, it is possible to conceive of the genre as a product of the fusion between international and national causes on the left permitted by the Second World War. This fusion is reflected in the inclusive internationalist dimension of anti-fascism represented in andártika. In a similar vein to andártika, Theodorakis’s art-popular songs made, as Tambakaki writes, ‘Greek poetry and music the vehicle for the promotion of a patriotic as well as an internationalist spirit, which united peoples from different countries and repressive regimes in their common longing and struggle for freedom’.Footnote ⁷¹ Returning to art-popular song’s central mission of creating edifying music that could promote the cultural uprising of the working classes, we can recall Skalkottas’s own grappling with the social utility of music. Considerations of accessibility and inclusivity were expressed in his evolving relationship with tonality in the last years of his life, his work with a group of amateur musicians for whom he wrote pieces in a more accessible atonal idiom, and his writing, found in a series of undated and unpublished essays.Footnote ⁷²

In a crucial example from an essay entitled ‘The Power of Symphonic Concerts’, Skalkottas comments on artistic accessibility and comprehensibility, music’s relationship to a living context, and the use of music to elevate the cultural level of the people. His wording is typical of socialist realist literature and criticism. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the language of Andrei Zhdanov’s 1934 keynote speech from the First Congress of Soviet Writers, which was reproduced in the popular Greek magazine Néoi Protopóroi [Young Pioneers] and echoed in the writings of prominent Greek cultural figures and intellectuals. Zhdanov discusses the necessity of artists

Subsequently, invoking a phrase that appears to be derived from Zhdanov’s definition of socialist realism, Skalkottas writes that:

Here, Skalkottas advocates for a ‘living new direction’ that would facilitate accessibility. Beyond this, given the crucial connection with the ‘living context’, music concerts enjoyed by the ‘great masses’ would reflect ‘greater intelligence and reason’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Programme notes compiled by Skalkottas for a performance of six of his Greek Dances by the Athens State Orchestra in January 1941 further illustrate the composer’s commitment to communicating to a ‘broader audience’ with a musical language that was familiar and accessible:

Skalkottas’s writings reflect a reconceptualization of the role and function of symphonic concerts that aligned with leftist political ideals of inclusivity and mass appeal as promoted by socialist realism. Art-popular song further developed these politico-musical concerns, bringing them into the heart of Greece’s musical and political life.

The ‘cleansing’ of rebetika from its disreputable qualities — its references to illegal activity and its Anatolian qualities, for example, which were decried by both left and right — facilitated its rehabilitation by Theodorakis within art-popular song. As previously mentioned, rebetika and the rebetiko style were central features in Theodorakis’s cultural-political agenda and works, as they demonstrated historical and morphological continuity with earlier and ‘authentic’ Greek musical culture. Therefore they served as an appropriate vehicle for the creation of a ‘genuine folk song’ and a ‘truly Greek Music School’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this way, in art-popular song rebetiko could become elevated to art music status and achieve official acceptance as authentic Greek popular song, even becoming steeped in Romanticized, virtuous notions of Greek civilization and culture.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Dimitris Varelopoulos writes, for Theodorakis and his contemporary Hadjidakis,

Rather than shifting the ontologies of popular culture, this appropriation, as Dimitris Papanikolaou writes, ‘must be seen in the context of the “popular politics” of Greek modernism (mainly associated with the “generation of the 30s”), and in the larger context of the legacy of demoticism in Greece’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Pertinently, this process of teasing out a ‘pure’ laïkó [popular] music from rebetiko, with its lowbrow and immoral qualities, was arguably set in motion earlier, in Skalkottas’s Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra, AK 24 (1945), where the thematic idea of the second movement is based on Tsitsanis’s rebetiko ‘I Mágissa tis Arapiás’ [‘The Witch of Arabia’]. Skalkottas’s decision to situate rebetiko in an art music context and to designate Tsitsanis’s tune as laïkó and not rebetiko on his autograph score foreshadows art-popular song’s rehabilitation of rebetiko as the ‘healthy’ expression of, and music for, the people. Theodorakis’s reverence for folk song as the pure and proper backbone for a new Greek national music — typified in his claim to ‘bow humbly in front of the works of our people, songs, and dances, of the songs of the most genuine folk composers’ — is further echoed in Skalkottas’s earlier expressed ideas of folk song as a socially entrenched and ‘purely Greek’ art.Footnote ⁸¹ Theodorakis’s mediation of Greekness through western aesthetic traditions — evident across much of his work, though perhaps most clearly realized in his early ‘classical’ compositions and in his development of art-popular song — can be traced back to the works of Skalkottas, who, as Katerina Levidou writes, created a peculiarly western interpretation of musical ‘Greekness’ by incorporating Greek folk tradition within a prevailing western musical aesthetic.Footnote ⁸² It is in this regard that Tsagkarakis, as cited earlier, asserts that Skalkottas’s engagement with popular urban music prefigured the broader cultural change which culminated in Theodorakis’s appropriation of rebetiko in art-popular song.

Art-popular song was firmly rooted in the traditions of rebetiko and Byzantine music, and Theodorakis often discussed ancient Greek drama as a prototype for the genre’s characteristic artistic synthesis. Considering the connections that this article aims to illuminate with the benefit of hindsight, it becomes possible to suggest that Theodorakis’s cultural-political agenda underlying art-popular song can similarly be traced historically to seeds of musical thought and practice from the cultural, social, and political crucible of the 1940s.

Theodorakis ostensibly conceived of 1960 as the beginning of a new era in Greek music, a ‘year zero’ after which popular music would be changed forever.Footnote ⁸³ As such, he appears to have sought to distance himself from the work of his contemporaries and predecessors, who in his view had been unsuccessful in reaching the masses and meeting the demands of the time.Footnote ⁸⁴ Regarding Skalkottas, Theodorakis’s few comments centre on his twelve-tone and atonal work. He is highly critical of the composer’s ‘formalism’ and his ‘scorn’ for the musical public, writing that ‘emotions, ideas, and humanity […] are the three features that bring works closer to the people that are entirely absent from the music of […] Skalkottas’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1960 he elaborated on these views, writing that:

Theodorakis’s comments sit uncomfortably in relation to an understanding of Skalkottas’s tonal works in the last period of his life. Despite Skalkottas’s relative obscurity, it is likely that Theodorakis was aware of these tonal compositions. Indeed, he acknowledges some more favourable qualities of Skalkottas, claiming, for example, that he ‘loved people with a great passion’.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, writing in 1960, a period during which Greek avant-garde music was being promoted with support from the US and Germany, Theodorakis might have viewed Skalkottas primarily as a representative figure of this avant-garde movement, thereby overlooking his tonal works. Through the retrospective lens of history and considering new sources pertaining to Skalkottas’s engagement with stylistic accessibility and tonality, we can begin to redress this misrepresentation or oversimplification of Skalkottas’s musical legacy and reclaim the latent historical continuity of art-popular song’s cultural-political agenda.

Their divergence on the issue of rebetika caused a rift between Xenos and Theodorakis that neither appeared committed to resolving. Indeed, as late as 1984, Xenos lamented Theodorakis’s popularization of rebetiko in an article entitled ‘Katigoró to rebetiko’ [‘I Accuse Rebetiko’].Footnote ⁸⁸ Notwithstanding these disputes, both Xenos and Theodorakis shared a common goal of crafting accessible national music that had direct relevance to the political causes of the proletariat. During the occupation, while he was involved in EAM, Xenos played a critical role in collecting, arranging, promoting, and transmitting ‘national liberation’ [ethnikoapeleftherotiká] songs. He also contributed to shaping the cultural programme that was planned to be implemented across Greece after the liberation.Footnote ⁸⁹ After early 1944, when Xenos fled persecution to Free Greece — a vast region of liberated areas stretching across central Greece and encompassing regions within Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia — he traversed the mountains, as Christos Kolovós writes, where the majority of guerrilla fighters were stationed. Passing through plains and ravines, he established choirs and philharmonic orchestras, arranging symphonic concerts and choral performances to ‘acquaint people with and promote the aims of the resistance, motivate people to the cause, and sustain fighters’ commitment to the struggle’.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the First Panhellenic Conference of Resistance in 1944, where guerrillas from all over Greece congregated, Xenos recalls speaking about the ‘significance of resistance songs in the battle for liberation’, likening them to the songs of the klephts (anti-Ottoman insurgents) in the Revolution of 1821.Footnote ⁹¹ During the conference, Xenos categorized approximately 180 songs which he had managed to collect from all over Greece, and he instructed the guerrillas on the most effective way to disseminate them.Footnote ⁹²

Xenos composed at least fifteen songs of his own, which he arranged for solo voice or choir.Footnote ⁹³ These songs are compiled in a file in the composer’s archive titled ‘Songs Written during the Period of the National Liberation Struggle’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Xenos also composed for the Resistance Theatre, itinerant theatrical companies that began gathering in 1943 in the regions of Free Greece. These theatre groups were associated with ELAS and the Political Committee of National Liberation (Politikí Epitropí Ethnikís Apelefthérosis), which was widely considered as the provisional government of Free Greece. According to Vassilis Rotas, the Director of Arts and Letters appointed by the provisional government of Free Greece, Rotas’s efforts in staging and performing theatre worked at ‘raising the national consciousness’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Furthermore, these companies and their performances aimed at promoting the message and spirit of resistance and engaging Greeks to the cause. Reminiscent of the Soviet agitprop initiatives that extended deep into the rural outreaches of the Soviet Union, the activities of the Resistance Theatre functioned as sources of entertainment and edification. Writing about the puppet theatre of EAM’s youth wing EPON, Maria Velioti-Georgopoulos states that, alongside aims pertaining to entertainment and culture, the primary mission of the theatre was to ‘uplift national morale, to awaken the people of “Free Greece” as a whole, regardless of sex and age, including the children, and to maintain the spirit of the Resistance against the Occupation, working towards liberation’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Theodorakis, like Xenos before him, synthesized aesthetic elements of western art music with features derived from Greek musical traditions, to engage a wider public in local political life and raise their cultural level. It therefore becomes possible to consider his synthesis of ‘art’ and ‘popular’, and the socialist vision for Greek music that it entailed, as indebted to Xenos’s wartime music and policymaking. We may indeed envision art-popular song as rooted in Xenos’s earlier attempts to excavate and bring together elements of Greek traditional and popular music in his pursuit of ‘new forms and means to express my feelings, which stemmed from the new reality’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Xenos describes his commitment to this process, to find an expression for the ‘pulse of our epoch, the longing of the working people’, in his autobiography:Footnote ⁹⁸

Notwithstanding these parallelisms, and despite shared musico-cultural priorities and political aspirations, there is little in Theodorakis’s writings or in the wider popular discourse surrounding the composer to ground art-popular song in the earlier work of Xenos or Skalkottas.