The great Greek musician and composer, Vangelis Papathanassiou, passed away at the age of 79, late on Tuesday night, May 17th.
The composer died in a French hospital from a coronavirus.
He was awarded the Oscar for the music for the film “Roads of Fire” in 1982.
He has also invested in music of many other movies such as Blade Runner, 1492: Christopher Columbus, Alexander, El Greco, etc.
Their full name was Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou and he was born in Agria, Volos, on March 29, 1943.
Abroad he was known as Vangelis and distinguished himself in electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz and orchestral music.
He influenced the development of different musical genres, while he is considered a pioneer of electronic sound.
He collaborated with Demis Rousseau, Irene Pappas and John Anderson.
In 1997 he directed the opening ceremony of the 6th IAAF World Open Track and Field Championships held at the Panathinaikos Stadium in Athens.
His work Myth was selected by NASA as the official music for the 2001 Odyssey mission to Mars, while in 2002 he created the official music for the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea – Japan.
Early years
Vangelis Papathanassiou was born on March 29, 1943 in Agria, Volos. He started composing at the age of four, and gave his first public performance at the age of six, without any musical education. He was self-taught despite the pressures of his parents, but also of his teachers, who encouraged him to take music lessons. However, he studied classical music, painting and directing at Academy of Fine Arts in Athens.
Participation in bands
In the early 1960s he took his first steps in music by joining the band Forminx.
The vehicle for the band’s success was the song Jeronimo Yanka which was a huge success, as the 45-bit album went gold in its first week of release.
In 1968 he moved to Paris and together with Demis Rousseau created them Aphrodite’s Child.
The successful double album with the title 666 is considered to have given him the impetus for the beginning of an international career.
While he was still a member of Aphrodite’s Child, timidly began to deal with different things. The beginning was made in 1970, when he wrote the music for a film by Henry Hapier. This was followed by an audio documentary influenced by the student uprisings in Paris in 1968.
In 1973 he started a successful collaboration with the director Frederick Rossiff for a series of wildlife documentaries, and shortly before going to London he released a solo album Earth.
Solo career
In 1975 he left Aphrodite’s Child to settle in London. There he founded state-of-the-art music recording facilities, the Nemo studios. He released his first collection entitled Heaven and Hell (1975), followed by other successful albums, such as Albedo 0.3 (1976), the Spiral (1977) for which he was awarded the International MIDEM Instrumental Prize, the Beaubourg (1978) and the China (1979).
At that time Papathanassiou began to become world famous.
In 1978 he collaborated with Irini Pappas on the album titled Odeswhich contains traditional Greek songs, while in 1986 they collaborated again on the album Rhapsodies.
Papathanassiou also did another great collaboration with John Anderson on four albums, the Short Stories (1978), the The Friends of Mr Cairo (1981), the Private Collection (1983) and the Page of Life (1991).
A large part of Papathanassiou’s compositions were created to frame film productions as a soundtrack.
The top soundtrack is considered to be The streets of fire (Chariots of Fire) for the 1981 film of the same name, which won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1982.
The film chronicles the efforts of three British runners at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Papathanassiou has written music in several fiction films, documentaries and television productions, among which stand out:
- Vortex – The face of the jellyfish (1967) by Nikos Koundouros,
- The Missing (Missing, 1982) by Greek director Costas Gavras,
- Blade Runner (1982) is a science fiction film by Ridley Scott.
- Roger Donalson’s Boudi Rebellion (1984),
- Francesco (1989) by Liliana Cavani,
- 1492: Christopher Columbus (1492 – Conquest of Paradise, 1992) for which he won the Echo Awards and the Golden Lion,
- The Black Moons of Love (Bitter Moon, 1992) by Roman Polanski,
- Cavafy (1996) by Giannis Smaragdis,
- Alexander (2004) by Oliver Stone,
- El Greco (2007) by Giannis Smaragdis.
Music for space
Space exploration has excited him since his early childhood, as he himself has stated.[7] Much of his work is dedicated to this, and over time the leading space agencies have trusted him to set to music their successes.
In 1980, the American television series began airing Cosmos: A Personal Voyage of Carl Sagan, which had as its main theme the place of man in the universe and the existence of extraterrestrial life. The musical investment of the episodes was created by Papathanassiou, while the series won an Emmy award and was shown in 69 countries and 500 million viewers.
In the summer of 2001 Papathanassiou presented the work Myth on the pillars of Olympian Zeus. The project’s music was created to accompany NASA’s 2001 space mission: Odyssey to Mars.
It was a spectacular musical performance, during which depictions with gods of ancient Greece and NASA space images were projected with special visual effects. The solo parts of the play were performed by sopranos Jesse Norman and Kathleen Battle.
The London Metropolitan Orchestra, a 120-member choir of the National Opera, also took part, while the composer himself played the keys. The play was televised all over the world while there were giant screens at the Panathinaiko Stadium.
After the end of the musical performance, the French government, represented by the Minister of Education Jacques Lang, awarded Papathanassiou the title of Order of the Legion of Honor in a ceremony that took place in the peristyle of Zappeion.
Two years later, NASA awarded him the Public Contribution Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to its vision. The award is the highest honor given by the American Non-Governmental Organization.
In 2013, NASA adopted Papathanassiou’s music for the second time with an original piece of music created to frame the video from the mission Hera (Juneau), which depicts the simultaneous movement of the Earth and the moon together for the first time. The video was captured during the Journey to Jupiter system.
In November 2014, the European Space Agency (ESA) proposed to Papathanassiou to compose the music for the first historic comet landing. Thus, he composed a musical trilogy (Arrival, Philae’s Journey and Rosetta’s Waltz) which was presented by ESA after the successful landing of Rosetta on Comet 67P.
In 1995, as a tribute to his musical contribution but also to his love of space, the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union named the composer after the Main Belt Asteroid 6354, now called 6354 Vangelis.
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