Manos Hadjidakis Biography by Steve Huey

Manos Hadjidakis (as his name is usually spelled in English) is perhaps modern Greece's greatest composer and songwriter, rivaled only by Mikis Theodorakis for the title. Hadjidakis helped usher in a new era of Greek music in the post-WWII era, elevating the earthiest strains of Greek folk and popular song into respected art forms. In the process, he found tremendous popular success in his home country, chiefly through his work as a pop songwriter, and became familiar to international audiences through his movie soundtracks, winning an Oscar in 1960. He also composed contemporary classical pieces for ensembles small and large, often inspired by Greek poetry, and wrote for theater and ballet. Many of his songs, larger compositions, and recordings are considered classics in Greece, and cornerstones of the country's modern popular music. He remained a highly respected intellectual and cultural figure in Greece up until his death in 1994.

Hadjidakis was born in the northern town of Xanthi, Greece, on October 23, 1925. He started piano lessons at age four, and later learned the violin and accordion as well. In 1932, his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to Athens. His father died in a plane crash in 1938, leaving the family in a dire financial state only worsened by the German occupation in World War II. Hadjidakis worked a succession of odd jobs to support his family, but also managed to study advanced music theory and composition as a teenager, also enrolling at the University of Athens to study philosophy (circumstances prevented him from finishing his degree). In 1943, he met the revered surrealist poet Nikos Gatsos, who would go on to become his favorite lyricist and work with him on the vast majority of his vocal compositions.

Hadjidakis first found an outlet for his compositional ability when he connected with the Art Theatre of Athens, and contributed music to its 1944 production of Alexis Solomos' The Last White Crow. He would work with the Art Theatre for the next 15 years, scoring a number of canonical plays by American and European writers, and also began to do the same for the Greek National Theatre starting in the early '50s. He wrote his first film score, for Free Slaves, in 1946, and the following year published his first contemporary piano piece, For a Small White Seashell. In 1948, Hadjidakis gave a high-profile academic lecture praising rembetika (sometimes spelled rebetico), the popular folk song form that was the province of the urban lower class and was regarded as borderline immoral by the conservative intelligentsia. The country's musical establishment was scandalized, but Hadjidakis had mapped out the path that would make him one of modern Greece's most cherished musical figures.

As a composer, Hadjidakis embraced rembetika on his 1951 piano work Six Folklore Paintings, which adapted rembetika melodies into a more artful presentation, and was also presented as a ballet (one of four he composed from 1949-1957). In the meantime, he had begun to compose music for theatrical productions of classic Greek tragedies, starting with Aeschylus' Orestes trilogy in 1950; normally, such a job was reserved for scholarly academics. He completed one of his major modern classical works in 1954's The C.N.S. Cycle, a song cycle for piano and baritone vocalist. The following year, he scored the motion picture Stella, which would prove to be one of his major successes in that area. Starring actress Melina Mercouri, whom Hadjidakis had known from her days in the theater, sang the song portions of the soundtrack, and would become one of Hadjidakis' most sympathetic interpreters.

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