CULTURE

Yiannis Ritsos’s ‘Epitaphios,’ a song that both united and divided Greeks

It was May 1936, a time when widespread industrial action and protests rocked Greece. One, a rally by striking tobacco workers in Thessaloniki, ended in bloodshed, with 12 dead, among them 25-year-old Tassos Tousis.

On May 10, the day after, the left-wing daily Rizospastis published a heart-wrenching photograph of the young man’s mother mourning over her dead son’s body. Poet Yiannis Ritsos saw the image and in a television interview in 1983 admitted he was so moved by it that the very next day he began writing “Epitaphios,” his most celebrated work. “In two days, almost without eating and sleeping, and often sobbing like a Maniot lamenter, I wrote the first 14 parts of ‘Epitaphios,’” he said.

The first two were published immediately, while 10,000 copies of the full poem came out a few months later, at a time when no one printed more than 500 or 1,000 copies of poetry, not even Kostis Palamas, “the patriarch of modern Greek letters.” Within a few days, the bookstore – run by the Greek Communist Party – which had published the epic poem, had sold 9,750 copies. The remaining 250, together with books by Marx, Lenin and Gorky, were burned at the Temple of Olympian Zeus by Ioannis Metaxas’s men. The dictatorship may have banned “Epitaphios,” but it had already sown its seed.

When the poem was republished in 1958, Ritsos sent a copy to Mikis Theodorakis, who was studying on a scholarship in Paris at the time. A few days later, the budding composer and left-wing activist started reading it in his car while waiting for Myrto, his wife, to finish her shopping.

“I was suddenly seized by a deep desire to set it to music,” he said later in an interview. By that same afternoon he had composed most of the music.

In an interview with Skai TV in 2003, Theodorakis revealed the circumstances under which he composed the landmark piece, named after Ritsos’s work.

“When I came back from Makronissos I was a wreck,” he said in reference to the island he had been exiled to along with Ritsos and other communists and leftists, from 1949 to 1950, where they were submitted to brutal torture.

“My body was not such a problem as was the fact that those terrible experiences left me with a terrible illness. I had epileptic fits and would lose consciousness. There was a time when I would faint, and when I came to, I would have a complete loss of personality; I did not know who I was, so I had to be looked after,” he said.

This situation persisted for a decade. “Strangely enough,” Theodorakis said, “when I wrote ‘Epitaphios’ I got better. It was so important. It showed me that it is all one thing.”

The seizures stopped as soon as he started penning his first melodies. “Epitaphios” started transforming “all that stuff, the psychological baggage that I had inside me, into something positive.” The composer needed to write music and until that point he had chaneled that need into European music but soon realized that it simply did not express him. “I did not express my insides, my pain, my wounds – I managed to turn all these things, instead of into madness and self-destruction, into an ending, into ‘Epitaphios.’”

When he completed the music he sent three copies: to Ritsos, to his friend Vyronas Samios and to fellow-composer Manos Hadjidakis, who offered to orchestrate and record it in Athens with Nana Mouskouri, in what turned out to be one of her finest performances.

On his return from Paris, Theodorakis wanted something more powerful to stir the sentiment of the popular masses, so, with Columbia records, he began recording the songs with rebetiko masters Grigoris Bithikotsis, whom he had met during his military service, and Manolis Hiotis. Hadjidakis, meanwhile, was recording his own version for the Fidelity label.

The two camps

The two versions of “Epitaphios” split the country, which had only just started recovering from a bloody civil war, but for different reasons. Those in the Hadjidakis camp preferred Mouskouri’s more lyrical rendition, while those in Theodorakis’s corner appreciated Bithikotsis’s laconic interpretation.Performances became rowdy affairs, with the crowd arguing over which version was better. In October 1960, at the Union of Cretan Students, Theodorakis defended Hadjidakis’s lyrical take, but said that he still preferred Bithikotsis’s emotive style. “Epitaphios” was performed all over the country to the delight of audiences everywhere, though there were also acts of sabotage against it, such as electrical cables at theaters being cut or the artists receiving threats.

Staunch communists were as reluctant to embrace it as were conservative composers and critics.

Since then there have been numerous new interpretations, by artists such as Stavros Xarchakos, John Williams, Iakovos Kolanian, Milos Karadaglic and Nena Venetsanou, among others.

It’s been 79 years since Ritsos wrote “Epitaphios” in just four days. But “Epitaphios” as melodized by Theodorakis is still one of the greatest revolutions that ever happened in Greek music.

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