Theodorakis – The ballad of Mauthausen / Six songs

Discogs

I’ve mentioned this work earlier (I didn’t know that I would own it a few weeks later). Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis worked together with Mauthausen survivor Iakovos Kambanellis to set four of his poems to music. Kambanellis wrote these while imprisoned in the Austrian concentration camp during WW II.

As with the recording I wrote about earlier, these are also romantic visions of love and hope in desperate times. It has been used in Holocaust memorial days all over the world, but was even more a part of cultural memory during the military junta of Greece (1967-1974), when Theodorakis and his music was banned in his own country.

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