Translated from french by Grok

The international recognition Mitropoulos gained by conducting major orchestras overshadowed his activity as a composer in his youth—which was far from insignificant. It was a body of work as rich in quantity as it was important in quality and in the innovative elements it brought to Greek music. “I am too full of foreign music to be able to produce my own,” the artist wrote in 1929 to his close friend Kathy Katsogianni. Yet despite all the “oppositions” he felt himself, his contribution to the evolution of composition techniques in Greece is undeniable.

According to the materials compiled by Mitropoulos’s researcher and biographer, Professor Apostolos Kostios, the artist began composing in the very first years of his musical studies. During his training at the Athens Conservatory, before he had even reached the age of twenty, he composed the “Sonata in C Minor” for violin and piano (1911) and the “Scherzo,” a piece for piano. This was followed by “A Concert Piece” for violin and piano, which he performed himself in public (on piano, as he was an exceptional pianist) alongside his teacher, the Belgian composer, conductor, and violinist Armand Marsick. “Yet his first compositional preoccupations certainly came to him at a time when he still lacked the necessary knowledge to notate them on the staff,” notes A. Kostios.

Next came “The Ashes” for male chorus, “The Dance of the Fauns, Fantastic Scherzo” for string quartet, and “The Burial,” with which he made his first appearance as a conductor in April 1915. About two years later, he reappeared before the Athens public performing only his own compositions, specifically the works “My Soul” (Sonata), “Sparks of Happiness” (Scherzo), “Camp Scenes” (Suite), “Sonata for Violin and Piano,” “The Mother’s Heart,” and “Last Song” (Songs).

The opera “Sister Beatrice,” the piano composition “For Crete, Feasts and Joys,” “Kassiani” for voice and piano, dedicated to his friend Katina Paxinou (who staged the work at her own expense in May 1920), as well as many other works (“Greek Sonata,” “Passacaglia, Intermezzo and Fugue,” “Aphrodite Urania” on the poem by Angelos Sikelianos, “Ten Inventions,” “Concerto Grosso,” “Amélie,” etc.)—along with his musical settings for the tragedies “Electra” (1936) and “Hippolytus” (1937)—reveal a rich and diverse output across the various genres he explored: from piano pieces to symphonic works, from chamber music duos to operas and lieder.

The following incident is revealing of the innovative elements that often characterized Mitropoulos’s musical output: on June 6, 1927, during the performance of his work titled “Ostinata in Three Parts,” the audience walked out before the concert ended, expressing their displeasure with music they probably didn’t understand.

This was just one of the many obstacles Dimitri Mitropoulos faced in his career, whether as a composer or as a conductor. His second specialty is also the one that absorbed him, relegating the question of “composition” to the background. In any case, what deserves to be highlighted when observing the musical journey of Dimitri Mitropoulos—from his first steps to the last hours of his life—is that, against all opposition and despite the attacks he endured, he stubbornly persisted in defending what was new in music, provided it had real value. He was an innovator both as a conductor and as a composer.

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