In my view, Manos Hadjidakis is the most important composer of the mid-20th century (not just the most important Greek composer). Without the influence of his music there would be no Pano Hora Ensemble.
For Muslims, a Hadj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. Orthodox Christians also use the word to recognize someone’s visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or baptism in the Jordan. Manos Hadjidakis’s surname likely reflects some ancestor’s pilgrimage to one of those places. More importantly, his music has become something of a sacred destination, too. As a child in Washington, D.C., listening to his songs in the 1960s and 1970s, I could hear that they were different from the other Greek songs in our record collection. The poetic lyrics added an unfamiliar dimension, especially in his collaborations with the great poet, Nikos Gatzos. But other Greek songwriters, including the other internationally famous one of that period, Mikis Theodorakis, also made use of exquisite poetry.
There is more to the unique, sacred feeling of Hadjidakis’s songs than their poetry’s beauty. Whether the subject is young love, lost love, a mountainous wilderness, the death of a girl, an evening’s stroll, or an eccentric old man living in a garden, they vividly bring to life specific people, moments and places, then transform them into something more. The frequent use of surrealistic imagery points in a mystical direction – the moon falls into a river, a prayer is fashioned from the hair of a beloved lady – but it is the music itself that elevates the scene in a manner akin to a hymn. Trying to describe how music produces feelings can only be a clumsy attempt to explain something ineffable. One cannot read one’s way to some destinations. One must visit them.
Despite Hadjidakis’s fame, I encounter many people, even professional musicians, who are not familiar with his music. That may seem strange to those who followed his career. He produced an uncountable number of great songs, and was well known in America, where he lived for five years (in the early years of the Greek dictatorship), won an Academy Award, had one of his most famous albums (Gioconda’s Smile) produced by Quincy Jones, and saw his songs recorded with the original Greek lyrics by such legendary American performers as Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte. (Yes, popular music used to be like that.) Nevertheless, it has been several decades since those things happened. We hope that our interest in his legacy will raise awareness of the greatness of his music.
Writing about his 1940s experience of rebetiko in the notes to Lilacs, Hadjidakis must have known that he also was summarizing his own effect on a generation of listeners: “dazed by the grandeur and depth of the melodic phrases, a stranger to them, young and without strength, I believed suddenly that the song I was listening to was my own, utterly my own story.” Great songs become everyone’s property. I remember on a ferry to Naxos about twenty years ago listening to two grandparents sweetly sing Hartino to Fengaraki to their granddaughter. Think about the effect on a young child of the line “if you had believed me even a little, it all would have been true.” More delightful words have never been heard by a granddaughter. That song became hers forever, just as it was theirs.
Hadjidakis’s corpus is vast, spanning more than four decades. Some of his music first appeared in plays: Hartino to Fengaraki was written for the Greek production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), and To Triantafillo was written for Federico Garcia Lorca’s Do᷉na Rosita (1959). Efige to Treno and Odos Oniron are from the 1962 musical, Odos Oniron. Some of his greatest songs appeared in films, including To Fengari Ine Kokino from Stella (1955), O Imittos from Liza Has Run Away (1959), Pame Mia Volta Sto Fengari, Nikhterinos Peripatos andHassapiko Nostalgique, from Never on Sunday (1960), and Mayico Hali is based on a melody originally written as the theme to Topkapi (1964). I Parthena Tis Yitonias Mou, from the album Gioconda’s Smile (1965), first appeared as an orchestral piece (with the narrative conveyed via program notes rather than lyrics). Hadjidakis also wrote song cycles, and two songs we particularly like, S’agapo and Lianotragouda, are from perhaps his greatest song cycle, O Megalos Erotikos (1972). Of course, he is best known perhaps for his stand-alone popular songs, including many of my personal favorites: I Timoria (1960), Kyr’ Adonis (1961), I Pikra Simera (1970) and Mikri Rallou (1970).
