Ancient Greek Myths in the Mirror of the German Occupation: Nikos Skalkottas and Luigi Dallapiccola

A student of Arnold Schönberg in Berlin, when Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949) returned to Greece in 1933, lived through one of the country’s most troubled periods, and notably the German occupation. This paper proposes the hypothesis that the works he composed during this period were a personal and aesthetic reaction towards the German occupation of Greece, through various means, one of them being the almost total absence of references to Greek antiquity and myths, given their ideological and aesthetic appropriation by the Third Reich. Through the cross-referencing of titles in Skalkottas’s catalogue with works composed by his contemporaries, we aim to show how the composer distanced himself not only from the Nazis, but also from Greek composers who held key posts in Athenian musical life. The question becomes much more complex and nuanced when one considers the fact that another composer born in the same year, the Italian Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975), who also composed using modern musical idioms, such as the twelve-tone technique, deliberately used Antique themes to express his anti-fascist position. The paper will examine the relationship between myth, musical genres, compositional traditions, and aesthetic movements through the adoption of a hermeneutic method.