Manos Hadjidakis was born in Xanthi, in Northern Greece, on 23 October 1925, and died in Athens on 15 June 1994. His father, who was killed in a flying accident in 1938, was a lawyer from Crete, while his mother came from Andrianopolis, the modern Turkish Edirne.
Growing up in Athens during the harsh years of Italian and German Occupation resulted in irregular studies at the University and the Athens Conservatory, in consequence of which Hadjidakis was considered to be largely self-taught. He identified with a group of high powered intellectuals and artists of the mid-war generation which included painters Yannis Tsarouchis and Yannis Moralis, and poets such as Nikos Gatsos, Angelos Sikelianos, Odysseas Elitis, and George Seferis.
With the undisputed originality of his daring ideas he often aroused strong feelings, gaining notoriety at the same time. The best examples of this were his lecture in 1949 on the up-to-then scorned rebetika songs, and the discontinuation in 1980 by the controllers of the Hellenic Radio and Television Organization of his original model for the Greek Third Radio Programme on the grounds of “provocative programming”.
From 1949 Hadjidakis remained a close associate of the modern dance company Hellenic Chorodrama and its founder dancer, the choreographer Rallou Manou, as well as of the stage director Karolos Koun and his Art Theatre. His long collaboration with both resulted in great productions that marked important cultural events for post-war Athens. These included the ballets For a Little White Seashell, Six Popular Pictures, Marsyas, The Accursed Serpent, Desolation, and the Ionian Suite. For Koun’s productions he created very successful music for plays by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Tennessee Williams and Lorca, music which was destined to become popular on its own merits, as, for example, the great success of his music for Aristophanes’ The Birds in 1962 at the Theatre of the Nations, later at the International Theatre Festival in London, and finally choreographed by Maurice Béjart in 1965 as an operatic ballet at the Brussels Opera House.
In 1962 Manos Hadjidakis financed an international competition for contemporary composers in association with the Technological Institute of Athens. With Lucas Foss presiding over the jury, the prize was awarded to the then unknown composer Iannis Xenakis.
In 1964 Hadjidakis founded and directed the Athens Experimental Orchestra, which during its brief existence, from 1964 to 1967, introduced to the public fifteen Greek composers. In 1967 he moved to New York, where he mainly worked for the theatre (Jules Dassin’s Ilya Darling with Melina Merkouri) and the cinema (after America, America by Elia Kazan, and Jules Dassin’s Top Kapı, he produced film scores for three Hollywood motion pictures: Blue, Fade In, and The Heroes). In 1972, returning to Athens, he was appointed director general of the National Opera House (1974–76), head of radio programmes (1975–6), director general of the Athens State Orchestra (1976), and director of the Third Programme of Hellenic Radio (1975–1981) which, owing to its originality played an influential rôle in the cultural life of the time. In 1989, Hadjidakis founded and conducted his own orchestra, which he called the Orchestra of Colours. Eight months before his death, in November 1993, his old friend and colleague Maurice Béjart presented his choreography on Hadjidakis’s song-cycle The Ballads of Athina’s Street at the Athens Concert Hall.
