Poeter – Mikis Theodorakis: “The words should fly”

Politically, Theodorakis was always on the side of the left, which he searched for in various ways.

Foto: United Archives/kpa

It must have been in 1980 that I experienced the premiere of the “Canto General” in the large hall of the Palace of the Republic in Berlin. Tosing applause for the composer Mikis Theodorakis, who also conducted, and for the singer Maria Farandouri with her wonderful mezzo -soprano. I did not expect such a monumental composition at a “Festival of the Political Song”, and I felt that Theodorakis also demonstrated its closeness to my country GDR. Only later did I understand how there was always a distance for him. In his feeling of personal independence, he would never have been able to cope with it if adaptation had been requested.

“The big singing” – an oratorio that I feel like I would have also fit into a church. Theodorakis had also created church compositions, which I didn’t know at the time. Whereby “Canto General”, after the famous memory cycle of Pablo Neruda (as early as 1953 he appeared in a reign by Erich Arndt near the people and the world), but also of the coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 when the military with General Pinochet at the top of the chosen socialist president Salvador falls, who took his life as the life Presidential Palace was bombed. Neruda died of cancer twelve days later. His house was looted and destroyed by the military.

The Chilean poet and the Greek composer were connected in the will to get politically committed to a better world. The poetic dream and the experience of violence – they lived in this area of tension. Born on the island of Chios on July 29, 1925, Theodorakis grew up in Tripolis on the Peloponnese, where he gave his first concert at the age of 17. At 18, he suffered detention and torture because he had joined the resistance to the fascist crew. Hardly free again, he was arrested again as a communist regime regime, banished to the island of Ikaria, that is, deported to a concentration camp and abused there so badly that he almost did not survive. I read twice, he was buried alive. How did he succeed that he didn’t break it?

And it went on. When he was involved in the military dictatorship after the “Obristen” coup after the coup of the “Obristen”, he was arrested again and was only released on international pressure. “In prison, Miki’s greetings and flower drawings from school children from the GDR achieved greetings and flower drawings,” recalls Hartmut König, who was closely connected to the GDR singing movement. »World -famous artists such as Arthur Miller, Dmitri Schostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Laurence Olivier and Paul Dessau had founded a committee for his liberation. In May 1970 the Junta had him left to Paris. “

Theodorakis lived in exile until 1974. He later announced how he kept clinging to the music. Already in the 1960s he developed his artistic concept to raise his country’s folk music traditions into contemporary. His “Sirtaki” for the film adaptation of Nikos Katzanzaki’s’ novel “Alexis Sorbas” in 1964, with Anthony Quinn in the leading role, became so famous that many thought he was a folk song, an epitome of Greece.

Politically, he was always on the side of the left, which he was looking for in various ways. He worked for both communist parties in Greece, for the Eurocommunists (the KP “domestic”) and for the Moskau -oriented (KP “abroad”), but he also cooperated with the conservatives – under Konstantinos Mittsotakis he was briefly minister without business area, which he described in retrospect as a mistake.

Mikis Theodorakis was 96 years old and has been extremely productive throughout his life. He composed over 1000 works- symphonies, oratorios, operas, chamber music, song cycles, ballet and film music. And he wrote poems. For its 100th birthday, the Axel-Dielmann-Verlag has now released a collection of his poems, translated by Ina and Asteris Kutulas. In addition, drawings by Angela Hampel and photos of the daughter Margarita Theodorakis. There are two of the forewords: by Konstantin Wecker and Hans-Eckart Wenzel.

The title “Paradisian Hell” opens the field of tension in which Mikis theodorakis lived. Against the background of extreme existential threat, many of his early texts arose: “I had to struggle for my life.

A lyrical self that circles and wants to grasp often in an inner dialogue. Passionate love and search for consolation, grief and unconditional will to resist. Word -of -the -art summons of longing: »The words should fly./ swimming. Drown./ disappear./ until they find you./ Dissolve in air.

We see a person in front of us who is forced to develop a great strength and who has the ability to pass them on through his art. “His poetry wants to be heard, and I advise all readers: inside …, to let Mikis Theodorakis have melted on his tongue and to perform his poems himself,” writes Konstantin Wecker in his foreword. “Poems are music, and you should take them in the same way.”

“A poet speaks here,” cheers Hans-Eckart Wenzel. “His language is enchanted by music and loading with the experiences of failure … The rhythm drums against forgetting and resigning.” Remember: “We are dead when we give up.” We want to take this sentence to heart.

Mikis Theodorakis: Paradisian hell. Poems & lyrics. Published by Asteris Kutulas and Raphael Irmer. Translated by Ina and Asteris Kutulas. With fore from Konstantin Wecker and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, drawings by Angela Hampel and photos of Margarita Theodorakis. Axel-Dielmann-Verlag, 168 pages, born, 26 €.

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