The Air of Greece

Item

Title

The Air of Greece

Date

17–18 December 2021

Date Issued

2021

Abstract

"The music theatre piece by Greek-American composer George Tsontakis, an award-winning creator well-known for the rhetorical and communicative power of his music, aspires to nothing less than a reconstruction of the poet’s Greek adventure: Byron arrived at Messolongi in January 1824 and died there three months later at the age of 36six, after an intense period of brave, though confused, involvement with the Greek War of Independence, of meditation on the onset of middle age and his awareness of the oncoming end, of visionary desire for heroic action as well as of impetuous passion for 16 -year-old warrior Lukas Chalandritsanos. The composer sets the “scene” at Byron’s deathbed and undertakes to render the dying poet’s consciousness through a musical and textual synthesis of authentic historical documents (in Greek) and fragments from his poetical work (in English). Sung by a vocal ensemble that combines the functions of English Madrigalists and Greek Chorus, the work juxtaposes the memory of the poet’s passionate and aristocratic youth to the chaotic war conditions he came up against in revolutionary Greece, thus highlighting the transcendent dimension of his ultimate, sublimely Romantic self-sacrifice on the altar of the ideal. "
(From Greek National Opera: https://2021.nationalopera.gr/art-never-ending-revolution)