THE MUSIC of Mikis Theodorakis, who celebrated his 90th birthday at the end of July, has been the vibrant pulse of popular culture and resistance to fascism in Greece and elsewhere for many decades.

Born on the island of Chios in 1925, Theodorakis was exposed to folk music from an early age and learned Byzantine chants as an Orthodox choirboy.

He composed his first songs as a teenager while travelling with his family from place to place, listening to different Greek musical traditions.

Many of his songs were influenced by Anatolian rhythms and melancholy lyrics, some of which go back to rebetika, a taproot of modern Greek music.

It began to develop during the 1920s and 1930s in the underworld of dope smoking and songs sung by cafe musicians in Piraeus and other Greek cities and it flourished following the arrival of a million refugees from Asia Minor.

Rebetika’s main instrument was the plangent-toned bouzouki and the style became popular with the urban dispossessed, representing as it did the oriental aspect of modern Greece.

Theodorakis, who embraced Marxism during WWII, became aware of the potential of rebetika melodies for a new type of song.

In 1947 he was exiled to the island of Ikaria by the post-war government for sympathising with communists and subsequently to the barren island of Makronisos where he was tortured and twice buried alive.

But despite enduring hard labour and such brutal conditions alongside many Greek communists, he composed songs combining popular song with the best of Greek poetry.

The Ballad of the Dead Brother, about two brothers fighting on opposite sides during the civil war in Greece, is an outstanding example of his work at the time.

Following his release, Theodorakis won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen.

On the path to becoming an internationalist classical composer, strongly influenced by the modernism of Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky and winning many awards, he attempted to merge contemporary European composition with Greek thematic material.

In the process he created a new style of music, using traditional Greek instruments with the bouzouki as the lead instrument, Byzantine rather than Western scales, and lyrics drawn from poetic texts.

In Epitaphios, one of his most powerfully allusive works of the period, he set eight poems by the communist Yannis Ritsos to music.

The cycle deals with the 1936 massacres of unarmed tobacco factory workers protesting for better wages in Salonica, linking the imagery of the martyrdom of the death of a worker with the Passion of Christ.

The authorities were alerted by Theodorakis’s political intentions and banned his songs from the airwaves. His music was nevertheless played enthusiastically in taverns and nightclubs and its influence is still ubiquitous today — Greeks whistle the melodies of those early songs or burst into impromptu renditions of them at any opportunity.

The 1960s saw a period of cultural blossoming in Greece and Theodorakis won international acclaim with his music for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, based on the novel by the great Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis.

Its main musical theme, “the syrtaki,” is inspired by the Cretan traditional dance and is a joyous embodiment of the Greek love of life.

Following the murder of hero of the anti-fascist resistance MP Grigoris Lambrakis that same year, Theodorakis was elected to parliament.

But his hopes for democracy in Greece were dashed in 1967 when the military dictatorship of Georgios Papadopoulos seized power. His work was again banned.

Theodorakis went underground and began to help organise the resistance to the junta. He was arrested but continued composing, even smuggling compositions out of prison including a song cycle devoted to the cause of the resistance.

Interned in a concentration camp, he was eventually released on humanitarian grounds following a massive international solidarity movement and went into exile in Paris. There, suffering from tuberculosis, he was immediately hospitalised.

The military junta lasted until 1974 and during this time one of his greatest interpreters Maria Farantouri recorded many of his protest songs with British guitarist John Williams, including poems by Federico Garcia Lorca and the Mauthausen Cycle, a soul-stirring tribute to survivors of the nazi death camps.

Theodorakis has been a prolific composer for the cinema, most notably with his haunting score for the Costa-Gavras film Z about the murder of Lambrakis.

He returned to Greece in 1974 and threw himself back into public life, resumed concert tours and composed one of his greatest works Axion Esti (Worthy It Is), with words by the poet Odysseus Elytis.

Its “metasymphonic” music combines choral and symphonic writing with popular song, in what Theodorakis has described as “a tragic summary of the history of modern Greece.” It was soon followed by his setting of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General to music.

Theodorakis has been a symbol of resistance in Greece against the persecutions which followed the armed struggle in 1944 and the ensuing civil war which — with British connivance — saw the blood flow in the streets of Athens and the Greek fascist dictatorship, followed by attempts to renew the democratic left.

In exile he fought for the overthrow of the colonels and gave thousands of concerts on world tours, meeting Pablo Neruda, Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende on his travels.

During the 1980s he became once again an MP and in the ’90s, controversially, collaborated with the right-wing New Democracy party. But he veered back to the left and recently backed the No vote in the Greek referendum and supports his country’s exit from the euro. 

Despite his turbulent political and musical career, Theodorakis stated at his 90th birthday celebration at the end of July that he lived the most intense years of his life in the ranks of the KKE.

“I stood as a KKE candidate in the Athens municipal elections and was elected as deputy of the party from 1981 to 1985,” he said.

“As you can see my CV is filled with struggles that I led from the ranks of the KKE which went alongside my most important musical compositions.”

KKE general secretary Dimitris Koutsoumbas paid tribute to the enormous contribution his musical genius has made to the cultural renewal of post-war Greece and to those in struggle against oppression all over the world.

“We celebrate 90 years of a people’s culture to which Mikis made a great contribution,” he said.

“He continues to be a symbol of resistance. He is demanding that the people oppose the new totalitarianism of the markets, so that they can become masters in their own home.”

As the Greeks go to the polls, there can’t be a more appropriate tribute than that.