The “art of musical works” emerges in Byzantium during the Palaiologan era, the period in which the beginnings of modern Hellenism can also be traced. Indeed, the new “melismatic style”, that gradually comes to dominate Byzantine music and reaches its peak in the early 14th century, requires (or entails) a new form of notation, capable of rendering the movement of the melodic line with precision. Among the named composers are Ioannis Koukouzelis (14th c.), Manuel Gazis, and Ioannis Plousiadenos (15th c.), who are credited with the earliest surviving examples of two-voice compositions in the Byzantine repertoire.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent incorporation of most Greek territories into the Ottoman Empire interrupted developments along the path followed by the European “art of musical works.” In Venetian-ruled Greece, however, musical life retained a Western European character. Renaissance Crete experienced a flourishing of music alongside theatre, poetry, and painting (the most prominent example being Doménikos Theotokópoulos – El Greco). Among other achievements, Crete is credited with producing the first Greek composer of an international career, Francesco Leontaritis (1518-1572), known as "Il Greco", who worked mainly in Munich, where he composed Latin motets, masses, and Italian madrigals. Yet the attempt to use authentic Byzantine chant as a tenor melody in a polyphonic motet is owed to the Cypriot composer Hieronymos Tragoudistis (mid-16th c.), a student of Zarlino and a proponent of improvements to Byzantine musical notation.

In the Venetian-ruled Ionian Islands, which became a refuge for many Cretan exiles, the Cretan polyphonic tradition in church music was preserved, while operatic activity was adopted very early: the San Giacomo Theatre in Corfu hosted its first melodramatic performance in 1733.

The Greek Enlightenment, which played a pivotal role in preparing the War of Independence, closely followed the principles of the French philosophes and maintained music as a central element in the vision of a liberated Greek state. The first “national” Greek composer, Konstantinos Agathophron Nikolopoulos (1786-1841), engaged in revolutionary activity before and during the Revolution and used his songs in Paris to influence public opinion.

At the same time in Corfu, the young nobleman Nikolaos Chalikiopoulos-Mantzaros (1795-1872) began his career with works for the San Giacomo theatre ("Don Crepuscolo", 1815). The success of the first Greek-language aria for orchestra ("Aria Greca", 1827) and his acquaintance with the national poet Dionysios Solomos led him to pursue a Greek-oriented musical idiom, abandoning stage music in favor of strict polyphonic forms, as a musical expression of the aesthetic Sublime, which he believed befitted the reborn Greek nation. Mantzaros devoted his life to music education in his hometown, teaching privately without compensation and leading the founding of the Corfu Philharmonic Society in 1840, the oldest Greek musical-educational institution offering free music training to all social classes.

Most composers of the so-called “Ionian School” were Mantzaros’s direct or indirect students, and many cultivated a musical “nationalism,” following Herder’s notion that a people’s soul resides in its folk songs. Key representatives include the Corfiot Iosif Liveralis (1819-1899), who in 1849 published the piano rhapsody "Le réveil du Klefte", using Greek folk themes; the fellow Corfiot Spyridon Xyndas (1817-1896), who composed the first Greek-language opera ("The Candidate") presented at the San Giacomo in 1867 with an entirely Greek cast and in which he incorporated folk melodies; and the Zakynthian Pavlos Carrer (1829-1896), who wrote three “patriotic” operas ("Marco Bozzari", "Frossini" and "Despo"), containing melodies that were probably folk – or at least folk-like.

The student of Xyndas and graduate of the Athens Conservatoire, the Corfiot Spiros Samaras (1861-1917) – today best known as the composer of the "Olympic Hymn" (1896) – was a foundational figure of verismo and the most famous Greek opera composer of the 19th century, thanks to the enormous success of "Flora Mirabilis" (1886). Because of this work, Samaras was described as a Wagnerian (endless melody, emphasis on the orchestra, and the use of leitmotifs). Also Wagnerian was the Ithacan Dionysios Rodotheatos (1849- 1892), another student of Mantzaros, who in the 1870s used leitmotifs in his symphonic poems. Without doubt, the Macedonian student and collaborator of Wagner, Dimitrios Lalas (1844-1911), also belonged to the Wagnerian current, while the rich output of the Patras-born Dimitrios Lialios (1869-1940) displays a post-Wagnerian idiom.

Opera dominated the post-Revolution musical life of both major and smaller urban centers in free as well as still-subjugated Greece. The city of Hermoupolis on Syros had welcomed opera as early as 1840 (the same time as the capital), and from 1864 it possessed an opera theatre modeled after Milan’s La Scala. On this small Aegean island, musical culture flourished; and by the late 19th century, the first Greek musicological dispute – between advocates of absolute music and program music – took place there. Under Ottoman rule, Thessaloniki became the first city with a Greek-speaking audience to host Puccini’s Tosca, in October 1900, just a few months after its world premiere in Rome.

In Athens – where just a few years after liberation (1830) a systematic and increasingly high-caliber operatic life developed thanks primarily to visiting Italian troupes – the search for local musical forces intensified after the mid-19th century. The solution came with the establishment of the Athens Conservatoire in 1871, initiated by Prime Minister Alexandros Koumoundouros (1815-1883). The Conservatoire aimed to cultivate music and theatre across all levels of society and set ambitious goals from the outset. The greatest names in Greek music passed through its halls, including the composer Spiros Samaras and the flautist Eurysthenes Ghisas (1864-1902) in the 19th century, and later the conductor and composer Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), the violinist and composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904- 1949), the pianist Gina Bachauer (1910-1976), and the ultimate opera diva, Maria Callas (1923-1977).

The humiliating defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 brought the issue of musical nationalism back to the forefront. Thus, the demand “We want Greek music,” which the intellectual Periklis Giannopoulos urgently repeated in 1904, had already been answered by the last two representatives of the Ionian School: the Corfiot Georgios Lambelet (1875-1945), who published a manifesto on Greek Music in 1901, and the Cephalonian Dionysios Lavrangas (1860-1941), founder of the “Greek Melodrama” (the precursor of today’s Greek National Opera), who presented his "First Greek Suite" for orchestra the same year Giannopoulos’ article appeared. This work, along with Lambelet’s equally folkloric "The Village Fair" (1907), predates the landmark 1908 concert at the Athens Conservatoire featuring works by Manolis Kalomiris (1883-1962) and which is considered the “foundational act” of the Greek National Music School, of which Kalomiris became the leading figure.

The influence of nationalist ideology was strong both on Kalomiris’ generation and on the one that followed. Indeed, the use of folk material was pursued with positive results by composers oriented toward Germanic late Romanticism – perhaps the most notable being Antiochos Evangelatos (1903- 1981) – as well as by those influenced by French Impressionism or the French-derived Neoclassicism. These last two tendencies are represented by two major composers: Aimilios Riadis (1880-1935) from Thessaloniki and Petros Petridis (1892-1977) from Cappadocia. Within the broader circle of the National School one can find the best representatives of an eclecticism inspired either by a sensitivity to new instrumental possibilities (Dimitrios Levidis, 1886-1951), or by openness to social and political engagement (Alekos Xenos, 1912-1996), or by receptiveness to new stylistic trends (Georgios Poniridis, 1887-1982). The outstanding figure of this last category is Dimitris Dragatakis (1914-2001), who worked with ease and success within the realm of pure modernism.

Modernism appeared in Greece as the ideological counterpart to musical nationalism, although in a sense it can also be viewed as its legitimate continuation. Historical priority is claimed by Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), whose brief compositional period nonetheless produced the first Greek twelve-tone work ("Ostinata", 1926). Mitropoulos also fostered a remarkably avant-garde musical life in interwar Athens, introducing contemporary works to Greek audiences – such as Stravinsky’s "L’Histoire du Soldat", which received its Athens premiere in January 1926. The most significant representative of atonal and twelve-tone writing in Greece, the distinguished Arnold Schönberg pupil Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949), was unable – or did not have the time – to establish a School in Greece; the same is true for Iannis Xenakis (1921-2001), who spent most of his life in France. This role was instead taken on by Yannis A. Papaioannou (1910-1989), who preserved an equally high artistic sensitivity and quality throughout all phases of his career and became the teacher of many of the most important composers across nearly three generations. Among the older ones, Michalis Adamis (1929-2013) – a key pioneer of electronic music in Greece – and Theodoros Antoniou (1935-2018), who devoted much of his life to promoting contemporary repertoire, stand out. However, the foremost representative of the second (post-war) phase of musical modernism in Greece is considered to be the prematurely lost Jani Christou (1926-1970), a profoundly metaphysical composer and creator of innovative musical systems.

 

Haris Xanthoudakis - Stella Kourmpana