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Mikis Theodorakis will be 80 this year (2005) and is unique in
his time—a wonderfully accomplished composer and a Greek
icon for democracy and the continuing fight for human rights.

 
His life has been characterized by his political commitment to the Greek people and their freedom, by persecution and struggle for survival. His activities as resistance fighter during the occupation of Greece by German, Bulgarian and Italian troops led to his arrest and torture in 1943. The Civil War of 1947-49 to him meant being tortured again and finally banished to the penal colonies of Ikaria and Makronissos, where he barely survived.

Mikis became one of the leading personalities among the renewers of Greece. After the assassination of the left-wing politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 he founded the Lambrakis Youth and took his seat in the Greek Parliament. When the military junta took over he founded the underground movement 'Patriotic Front'. Shortly afterwards he was arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp of Oropos. The fascist Junta (1967-1974) published Army decree No.13, which banned playing and even listening to his music.

He was released in 1970 in response to an international initiative of important artists such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Hanns Eisler and Leonard Bernstein and lived in exile in Paris until 1974.

 
Mikis has been outspoken throughout his life and continues to do so and for this has been imprisoned, tortured and for a while exiled from his native Greece. He has served as a minister in later Greek Governments, was short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 and continues to receive international awards.

For most people this would be enough but he has also composed prolifically (over 100 works) and in the 50’s went back to the roots, the genuine Greek music, and with his song cycle "Epitaphios", started a cultural revolution in his country. With his marvellous works based on the greatest Greek and world poetry he has given its dignity to Greek music and soon become an internationally renowned musical genius.

Mikis Theodorakis is undoubtedly Greece's greatest living composer.