Nikos Skalkottas

MyGen Profile Generator Nikos Skalkottas was born in Halkida on the 8th of May 1904. At the age of five his started learning the violin with his uncle. His family moved to Athens where he studied violin with Tony Schulze at the Athens Conservatory and graduated with a diploma and an Averoff scholarship to follow further studies in Berlin at the Academy of Music. He continued studying violin until 1923 when he decided to devote himself to the art of Composition (leaving behind him a promising future and a lucrative career as a soloist performer). He then studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Kahn, Paul Juon, Kurt Weill, and Philipp Jarnach until 1933 when he returned to Greece due to personal reasons. From 1925 he began composing his first masterpieces up till the time he left Germany-leaving behind him a big amount of his works doomed to be lost…In Athens he started working in various orchestras as a violinist but his environment never understood most of his work, thus he bitterly continued to compose in secrecy. In Berlin (by 1931) some of his atonal and serial orchestral scores were performed, and later in Greece a few of his 36 dances for orchestra (with whom he gained a little reputation in Greece). In May 1944 Skalkottas was arrested by the Nazis for infringement of the curfew and spent a month and a half at Chaidari camp. By the year 1949 Skalkottas had composed many brilliant pieces often compared to that of Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg. His is probably the only composer whose compositions have elements of both the twelve-tone system and the tonal system. He gave new ideas on counterpoint and orchestration, that even his teachers in Germany said that they needed time to fully understand and appreciate them. He also studied greek traditional music and captivated the true soul of Greece in his “36 dances for orchestra” by uniting the genuine instinct of a traditional musician and the architecture approach of a classically trained one. He has composed orchestral works (both tonal and atonal and the combination of both), ballets, piano concertos, violin concertos, octets, string quartets, 32 pieces for piano, suites for orchestra (there are about 120 compositions left today from the 150 that he had finished), as well as music articles. Nikos Skalkottas died tragically by a abdomen problem on 19 of September 1949, as he had no money for his treatment (he gave money for the upcoming birth of his second child preparations). At the time of his death on19th September 1949, Skalkottas' work was practically unknown and unpublished! Skalkottas foresaw things that others even to these days have not achieved, his vision was ahead of his time. He “did not care for his life, but for his work” as he wrote in a letter, his work of finding musical substance of combining different musical worlds together in one common tongue, one common true nature. He was a musical genius and a gentle tormented soul that even to these days his music has not yet been “discovered”.Opinions shared for Nikos Skalkottas:“He is a born Composer!” Arnold Schoenberg,“Who has thought of such sounds after Skalkottas?” Jani Christou (answer to the question of John. G. Papaioannou when listening to “Ulysses’ Symphony”: “who has thought of such sounds in 1941?”), “If we weep now for the cruel loss of Skalkottas, we weep again for the loss of a composer that had achieved to transform in sounds the Soul and deeper touch of Immortal Greece” Manolis Kalomoiris.