Nikos Skalkottas

Nikolaos Skalkottas

Nikolaos (Nikos) Skalkottas (Greek: Νικόλαος Σκαλκώτας) (born 1901 in Chalcis, died 1949 in Athens) was a Greek composer of 20th-century music. A member of the Second Viennese School,He drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition.

Very early on he started violin lessons with his father and uncle. He continued studying at the Athens Conservatory and graduated in 1920. From 1921 to 1933 he lived in Berlin, where he first took violin lessons with Willy Hess. In 1923 he decided to give up his career as a violinist and become a composer. He studied composition with Paul Kahn, Paul Juon, Kurt Weill, Philipp Jarnach and Arnold Schönberg. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Skalkottas returned to Athens, where he earned a living playing in different orchestras.

Skalkottas' early works, most of which he wrote in Berlin and some of those written in Athens, are lost. The earliest of his works available to us today are dating from 1922-24 and are piano compositions as well as the orchestration of "Cretan Feast" by Dimitris Mitropoulos. Among the later works written in Berlin are the sonata for solo violin, several works for piano, chamber music and some symphonic works. During the period 1931-1934 Skalkottas did not compose anything. He started composing again in Athens continued until he died. His works comprise symphonic works (Greek Dances, the symphonic overture Return of Ulysses, the fairy drama Mayday Spell, the second symphonic suite, the ballet The Maiden and Death, the Classical Symphony for winds, a Sinfonietta and several concertos), chamber music works, as well as vocal works.

Skalkottas died unexpectedly in 1949, leaving some symphonic works with incomplete orchestration. Besides his musical work, Skalkottas compiled an important theoretical work, consisting of several "musical articles", a treatise on orchestration, musical analyses etc. Skalkottas soon shaped his personal features of musical writing so that any influence of his teachers was soon assimilated creatively in a manner of composition that is absolutely personal and recognizable. Thus --in view of his works available to us-- Skalkottas' evolution as a composer follows certain invariable axes that define his confrontation with the historical, technical and musical challenges of his epoch, throughout his life.

Skalkottas's short life seems to symbolise the special vulnerability of the Schoenberg pupil whose musical roots lay a little outside Austro-Germanic traditions. In John Thornley's persuasive assessment, 'throughout his career Skalkottas remained faithful to the neo-classical ideals of Neue Sachlichkeit and "absolute music" proclaimed in Europe in the 1925.' Like Schoenberg, 'he persistently cultivated classical forms', but his worklist is divided between 'atonal and 12-note' and 'tonal' works, both categories spanning his entire composing career. Such apparent heterogeneity could have been intensified by a love of Greek folk music. Nevertheless, he 'remained sceptical of the attempts of his Greek contemporaries to integrate it into the modern symphonic style', and only in one major work he juxtaposed and mixed folk, atonal and 12-note styles: the incidental music to Christos Evelpides's 1943 fairy-tale drama Mayday Spell, Skalkottas was evidently reluctant to deploy the kind of structural and stylistic tensions that would have betrayed the integrationist ideals of his Schoenbergian inheritance. Thornley sees his historical position in terms of a comprehensive connecting impulse, 'as a link between the second Viennese, Busoni and Stravinsky schools'. Skalkottas was able to draw diverse and in some ways conflicting threads together and not to compromise, rather to enhance, his own originality, range and power of expression'. Nevertheless, his music 'has had only limited influence on postwar trends, even in Greece', and Thornley attributes this to 'its generally uncompromising demands on listener and performer alike, and its seemingly conservative formal and thematic aspects'.

As far as I am aware, Skalkottas's centenary day, 21 March 2004, passed without any significant acknowledgement from the musical world at large.

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