The great music composer Yannis Markopoulos has died.
The Greek composer had been battling cancer for a year, and on May 5 he was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of the Athens General Hospital “Alexandra”.
A few days ago, Yannis Markopoulos underwent an operation to treat cancer, but since his body was particularly weakened, complications arose.
Yannis Markopoulos was a very big chapter in the history of Greek music as he was inspired and created a new musical movement in the context of which he masterfully combined the traditional with the classical and the modern sound.
A prolific writer, he composed, during his long career, works covering a wide range of music, from art music and orchestral pieces to operas, oratorios and music for theater and cinema.
Who was Yannis Markopoulos?
Yannis Markopoulos was one of the most important modern Greek composers alongside Mikis Theodorakis, Vangelis Papathanasiou and Thanos Mikroutsikos. He was born in 1939 in Heraklion, Crete. His father is Georgios Markopoulos, former prefect of Lasithi and his mother is Irini Aeraki from Sitia.
He spent his childhood in Ierapetra, where he took his first music lessons in theory and the violin. His first influences came from local music with its fast dances and repetitive short patterns, from classical music, as well as from the music of the wider eastern Mediterranean, and especially of nearby Egypt.
In 1956 he continued his musical studies at the Athens Conservatory, with the composer Georgios Sklavos and the violin teacher Joseph Bustidui. At the same time, he was admitted to Panteion University for social and philosophical studies while at the same time composing for theater and cinema.
In 1963, he won an award for his music in Mikres Aphrodites by Nikos Koundouros, at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, and in the same year his musical works Theseas (dance drama), Hiroshima (ballet suite) and Three sketches for dance were staged by new dance ensembles.
From October 1965 to April 1984, he provided music for all the plays presented by the Barba Mitoussis Puppet Theater. This Puppet Theater finally ended its operation on April 15, 1984.
In 1967 a dictatorship was imposed on Greece and Yannis Markopoulos left for London. There he enriched his musical knowledge with the English composer Elisabeth Lutyens.
At the same time, he completed the musical ceremony “Behold the Bridegroom”, a work that keeps an anecdote, except for one section, of the famous Zavara-katra-nemia, which is one of his most famous pieces. In the same period he met the composers Giannis Xenakis and Giannis Christou and came into contact with the most innovative musical works. In London he also composed the Choruses, for symphony orchestra, and the first Pyrrhic dances A, B, C, (out of the 24 he completed in 2001), which were played, in 1968, by the Concertante Orchestra of London at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Then he also wrote the music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, staged by the National Theater of England, directed by David Jones.
In 1969 he returned to Athens to contribute with his works to the path for the restoration of democracy, creating a new movement for art and its utility and seeking the deeper unity of man with his natural and social environment.
