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At Averoff - Drawing by an inmate
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On New Year's Day 1968, after Theodorakis had been transferred to the Averof Prison, he had a conversation with a fellow prisoner - Leonidas Kyrkos - who gave him encouragement in a direction he was already exploring. He describes the conversation in his Journals of Resistance...
"- You must find something new, something exceptional, for your music.
- True. I want to break the bounds of the song, to free it.
- As you did with Ritsos's poem Romiossini.
- I want to go even farther, following a line of inner progression. And outside the classical framework.
- Oh, you've got something simmering...
- I've got this collection of Seferis's poetry here. You remember that poem I set to music called 'I Have Kept Hold of Life'. Do you know how many verses I took from it? Four or five. Well, I'm going to take the whole poem and make a song, an immense song.
- You're going to start on it?
- This very evening. As soon as they've closed the gates.
Thus the new musical form which I have called flow-song was born".
'I Have Kept Hold of Life' was a song from the Epiphania cycle. Theodorakis did not alter the basic melody of the song but expanded it, adding more verses and setting it as a cantata for singer, six voices, mixed choir and orchestra.
To me it is one of the most disappointing works of the dictatorship period, although it was received well. The singer Kaloyannis, who is particularly fond of the work, has probably contributed to its popularity with Greek audiences. The addition of the choir seems to me to do nothing for the original and the melody and harmony are not expanded in any significant way.
But the form of the flow-song was to become the most important vehicle for Mikis's invention in the years that followed.
It gave him the scope and freedom which the popular song and even the song cycle had denied him. In the fourteen months at Zatouna he would develop his flow-songs into some of the finest of his compositions.
© Gail Holst
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