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Theophrastos Sakellarides
was born inAthens in
1893 and studied music in Greece. He left Greece
and continued his studies in Munich and Italy, re-
turning to Athens in 1904. Talented and prolific,
Sakellarides managed to create his own personal
style by integrating influences and elements from
Austrian and French operetta, Greek folk songs,
popular serenades, Italian opera, Neapolitan
songs, gypsy music, popular genres and even jazz.
From 1909 until his death in 1950, Sakellarides
composed around 80 operettas, including
Haunted
Bridge
(1912) and
At the Sheds
(1914).
The God-
son
is the most characteristic and most frequently
performed of his works; it is said he completed it
in just 40 days.
Sakellarides wrote extensively for “epitheorisis”
(Modern Greek popular revue satirizing social
and political issues); “Panathenean” (1907-1913),
he adapted music from European works by Franz
Lehar, Kalman or Richard Strauss for texts written
by the Greek “epitheorisis”.
Sakellarides died in poverty andwas buried at pub-
lic expense. Upon his death, Manolis Kalomiris
wrote in
Nea Estia
magazine (January 1950):
Another leading and founding figure of Greek
music has departed…He sounds forever warm-
est and vivid in our souls and hearts and will
always resound everywhere in Greece and the
Hellenic world…and will give us rest from the
fatigue of hard work and everyday hardships.
The theatre historian Yiannis Sideris wrote in the
same magazine: “… As a composer he [Sakel-
larides] did for operetta what Xenopoulos did for
prose”.
The Infernal Comedy:
Confessions of a Serial Killer
(17 September, Makarios III Amphitheatre in
Strovolos)
The Infernal Comedy
is a stage play for a baroque
orchestra, two sopranos and one actor. It is based
on the real-life story of Jack Unterweger – ac-
claimed poet, celebrated author and journalist,
notorious womanizer and convicted murderer.
Unterweger was gradually suspected of killing a
growing number of prostitutes in Vienna, Graz,
Prague and Los Angeles; he vanished from Vien-
na and fled to the USA, where he was arrested in
Miami, FL. He was returned to Austria, where he
committed suicide after being convicted of eleven
homicides.
In the first scene of
the Infernal Comedy
, Jack is
reading from his brand new novel; he then drifts
into his memories, accompanied by the melodra-
matic music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s
Don Juan
. Between his monologues, several
scenes are performed by Jack and one of the two
sopranos. Following the doctrine of the affections
of baroque music, each of these scenes and its
arias represent joy, hatred, love, grief, desire and
admiration, all in the context of Jack’s various re-
lationships, and include solo-pieces like
La scena
di Berenice
and other pieces by Vivaldi, Handel,
Gluck, Haydn and Mozart.
The set features a table with a glass of water and
some new copies of a voluminous paperback; as
the play opens the orchestra plays the dramatic
journey to “hell”, enhanced by the
L’Enfer
of C.W.
Gluck’s
Don Juan
. After the music concludes, a
Artists
Soprano
: Katerina Mina
Mezzo soprano
: Vivien Cooksley
Tenor
: Nikos Stephanou
Baritone
: Michalis Katsoulis
Aris Choir of Limassol
Choir Master
: Marinos Mitellas
Orchestration
: Samy Elgazzar
Conductor
: Yiorgos Aravides