1. As related posthumously by his Greek contemporaries, friends and acquaintances: the composer Yannis Constantinidis, the pianists Antonios Skokos, Katina Paraskeva-Skokou and Marika Papaioannou, the music critic Minos Dounias, the composer’s lifelong confidante Nelly Askitopoulou-Evelpidi, his sister Kiki Verdesopoulou; and in the writings of John Papaioannou, archivist of the Skalkottas Archive in Athens. (See articles JP-Harf ² 338, Skokos, Dounias, also Interviews IntAsk 9.2.1972 and 19.9.1973, IntJP 10.12.1971, IntConst 23.12.1971, Int K P-S 6.7.1973, IntVerd 3.7.1973.)

2. Letter of Peter Schacht to Erich Schmid, 22 October 1933: ‘We sent off Skalkottas — around March — back to Athens, with a lot of difficulty ... He was just living off his debts, and was so worn down that he couldn’t work at all.’ ( Schmid:Melos 203). It is not quite clear whether by ‘work’, Schacht meant ‘earn his living’, or ‘compose’, or perhaps both.

3. Skalkottas had arrived in Berlin in 1921 at the age of seventeen with a grant from the Athens Conservatoire for postgraduate violin studies at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. In 1923, prompted by a performing-related strain in his left hand, diagnosed as tendonitis, he had abandoned his violin studies and his future career as a concert violinist, deciding to devote himself to composition (Letter to Prof. Willy Hess, Hochschule für Musik, Berlin, 9.6.1923, also see Skokos and IntConst 23.12.1971).

4. As shown in photographs in the Skalkottas Archive in Athens.

5. Of a strangulated hernia he had neglected to have treated until too late. (IntPerras 28.5.1973.)

6. He is still best-known for his ‘36 Greek Dances’, brilliantly orchestrated arrangements of Greek folk songs in a popular tonal style, quite uncharacteristic of his main output of serious works.

7. Of which seven date from the period 1928-30, while forty-eight letters, the bulk of the correspondence, date from the years 1931-1933. All are in Skalkottas’s rather idiosyncratic Greek. A final letter, absent from the collection, was listed by Benakis as ‘24 December 1936’.

8. Manolis Benakis allowed the author to study the letters in Athens in June 1973. (The final letter was already missing.) The whereabouts of these letters since Benakis’s death in 1977 is unknown; the author is apparently the only scholar who has seen them up to now. The present article is based on a lecture given at Athens University on 12 November 1999, the first occasion on which the existence of this correspondence was publically revealed.

9. Skalkottas was admitted to Schoenberg’s Masterclass at the Prussian Academy, Berlin, in October 1927 (matriculation certificate, Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin). After his three official years were up, Schoenberg allowed him to participate in the class until 1933.

10. «μιά αστείρευτη πηγή...» a phrase reminiscent of John 4:14, Rev. 21:6 and the ‘inexhaustible source of life-giving water’ in the lenten Akathistos to the Virgin Mary; whether a conscious biblical reference or not, the metaphor shows the emotional depth of Skalkottas’s admiration for Schoenberg.

11. Skalkottas’s own manuscript draft (in Greek) for the Introduction to ‘Four Greek Dances’, published by the French Institute, Athens, 1948. These words were omitted from the printed edition in French.

12. Notwithstanding the importance of Skalkottas’s personal correspondence with Nelly and Chrysoula Askitopoulou and Sophia Pimenidou (thirty-two letters between 1921 and 1928, of which twenty-four, mainly addressed to Nelly, date from 1925). His letters to Yannis Constantinidis, Rudi and Walter Goehr, and Marika Papaioannou are important in contents, but frustratingly few in number (see Bibliography for ms sources). Of Skalkottas’s letters to Matla Temko, in the private possession of Artemis Lindal, the daughter of Skalkottas and Matla Temko, the author has seen only two, of 8 May 1928 and 27 November 1935 (see n. 43 and p. 215). Skalkottas left no autobiography, with the exception of brief notes for the Introduction to the ‘Four Greek Dances’ (see previous footnote).

13. LB 11 June 1932.

14. IntBen 5.6.1973. Benakis had retained his diary notes of his dated visits to Berlin, and showed me a bound full score of the 36 Greek Dances presented to him by Skalkottas; this score is now in the Benakis Archive, Kifissia, Athens. (See p. 215, nn. 246, 247.)

15. LB 22 Feb. 1931.

16. (IntConst 23.12.1971, 6.6.1973). To a friend, the pianist Marika Papaioannou, Skalkottas wrote: ‘I came to Berlin to conclude business matters of my patron, which as you know I do with a great and sincere interest’ (Letter to MP 8 July 1930). The ironic intention is unmistakable.

17. IntBen 5.6.73, JP-Harr ² 338.

18. LB 26 October 1931: ‘It’s rather strange for you to have [scores by] Bruckner, Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, and Schubert, and not to have Bach, Mozart, Haydn, although you know their work.’

19. There are no known performances of any music by Skalkottas in Athens or Berlin before 1928.

20. See n. 90.

21. LB 12 July 1932.

22. A word that often appears in Skalkottas’s letters to Benakis, even as late as 1931 and 1932.

23. In Athens during the autumn/winter of 1930 (LB 17 July 1930 and 30 September 1932).

24. LB of 17 July 1930 and 30 September 1932.

25. In stark contrast with the wealthy Benakis family, Skalkottas’s parents were of quite poor working-class origin, his father a freelance flautist in the café orchestras of Athens. In Berlin Skalkottas had had considerable hardship while supporting himself before Benakis’s grant began in 1928 ( Skokos . IntConst 23.12.1971, 6.6.1973).

26. e.g. ‘a fate worse than death’ (Letters to Askitopoulou, 16 June 1925). ‘It would be wrong for me to return to Greece now. For me a development is possible only in the musical centres of Europe.’ (23 June 1925). ‘Greece...that graveyard for a professional musician... [To return] would be signing my own spiritual and musical death warrant’ (16 July 1925). In LB 10 March 1931, Skalkottas expresses similar views. (See p. 194 and n. 109).

27. No letters of Benakis to Skalkottas survive. Skalkottas claimed that he had ‘torn them all up’ (LB 11 June 1932).

28. Unsurprisingly, given the Benakis family’s background and his father’s museum collection (see p. 183).

29. See n. 26.

30. LB February 1932 to January 1933.

31. Almost exactly five years older than Skalkottas, who was born on 8 March 1904 Old Style (i.e. 21 March in the Western Calender). Manolis Benakis was born on 28 March 1899 in Liverpool, England. He died on 6 November 1977. (Information from Valentini Tsellika, Benakis Archive, Kifissia, Athens).

32. b. 1843 Syros, d. 1929 Athens (Παγκόσμιο Βιογραφικό Λεξικό, Athens 1983).

33. Who had once again returned to office as Prime Minister in 1928 (Campbell and Sherrard: Modern Greece London 1968, 144). Venizelos bequeathed his own writings and correspondence to the Benakis Archive, an offshoot of the Benakis Museum.

34. One of its recipients had been Skalkottas’s friend Dimitri Mitropoulos. (See p. 192 and n. 98.)

35. b. 1873 Alexandria, d. 1954 Athens ( IIB ).

36. Antonis moved from Alexandria to Athens in 1926; the announcement was made in 1927; the Benakis Museum opened in 1931 ( IIB: Antonis Benakis).

37. All mentioned in LB, passim. It seems unlikely that Manolis intended to add his western musical collection to his father’s museum of artefacts and manuscripts of Greece and areas settled by Greeks. It is possible though that Manolis intended to prove himself by rivalling his father’s collection; perhaps he even thought of eventually founding his own museum.

38. They had lived in the same house in Lankwitz, Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse 80 (int K P-S. 6.7.1973; Skalkottas writes to Nelly that his relations with Farandatos are cordial but not close (Letter to Nelly Askitopoulou, 1.10.1925).

39. IntBen 5.6.1973.

40. Averof and Marinos Scholarships of the Athens Conservatoire, 1921-25, as detailed in the balance sheets for those years. The sums Skalkottas was given would have been seriously eroded by inflation (in Germany, 1922-24) and by the devaluation of the drachma at the end of 1922. He was awarded a generously increased grant of 13,200 dr. in 1923-24, equivalent to £44 per year, but the following year’s grant of 3,000 dr. for 1924-25 would have been worth no more than £10. Skalkottas certainly had to work to support himself from 1924 onwards, probably even earlier. ( Bidwell 25-26, AthConsLE 1920-21, p. 10; 1921-22, 18; 1922-23, 13; 1923-24, 14; all figures are confirmed by balance sheets in AthConsEP 1921-25.)

41. See footnote 3.

42. Undated letter to Nelly Askitopoulou, apparently (from the context) written in September 1926.

43. IntBen 5.6.1973. Benakis drew on his diary notes for the details of all dates he gave me during the interview. They contradict Papaioannou JP-Hart 1^st ed., 322) in his dating of the grant ‘from 1927 on’ and his revised dating (2^nd edition, 337): ‘from 1923 on’. That the grant began in the spring of 1928, as Benakis claimed, is supported by references in letters to Askitopoulou (30.4.1928 and 8.5.1928) and in a postcard to Matla Temko (7.5.1928).

44. «Υττοτροφία» [‘scholarship’] is the word Skalkottas always uses in his letters to Benakis for the grant, as if to emphasise that the money is to support his studies with Schoenberg.

45. Apparently at the prompting of Nelly Askitopoulou (letter to Askitopoulou, 30.4.1928). Skalkottas writes ‘increased to £12’. Assuming this was a monthly payment, it would have given Skalkottas a generous but not exorbitant amount of 240 marks per month, as the pound sterling was worth about 20 marks at this time (Bidwell 23). Skalkottas writes on 10 March 1931 that he has rejected Schoenberg’s offer of a post at the Berlin State Opera, because it is only 120RM per month, ‘a sum on which it’s impossible to live here’ (LB 10.3.1931). It seems therefore unlikely that the ‘£12’ could have been a quarterly payment: Skalkottas was able to stop working and still live quite comfortably (“IntConst 23.12.1971. SchmidMelos 203); it is difficult to see how he could have managed this on 80 marks per month.

46. Letter to Constantinidis 9.9.1928.

47. ‘My heart is still full of great joy that I shall now be free in the evenings.’ (Letter to Nelly Askitopoulou, 8 May 1928.)

48. ‘Why on earth did Benakis think that young boy Skalkottas was capable of such complicated business deals?’ (IntPerras 28 May 1973): a reaction echoed in interviews with Askitopoulou, Constantinidis, and Marika Papaioannou.

49. ‘In the matters of [practical] life I’m the most incapable person you can imagine. Apart from notes and musical combinations I can’t think clearly. In everything else I make mistakes and blunders.’ (LB, undated letter, mid-January 1932.)

50. Andreas Souras (often spelt ‘Sourras’) is mentioned frequently — he seems to have been Benakis’s emissary to Berlin. (The dearth of correspondence in 1928 and 1929 is explained by Benakis’s long visits to Berlin during both years.)

51. LB Undated letter of late December 1929.

52. LB Letter of 22 February 1931.

53. LB 22 February 1931.

54. Nürnbergerstrasse 19, in Charlottenburg.

55. Skalkottas wrote to Constantinidis on 3.9.1928. The volume of his news suggests he has been in Athens for at least 2 weeks (among other things, trying to exempt himself from military service). He returned to Berlin on 31.10.1928 or 1.11.28. (‘I’ve been here for nine days...’ LB 9.11.1928).

56. The abrupt gap in the flow of correspondence with Nelly Askitopoulou from December 1925 suggests his new love with Temko may well have begun at this time.

57. Named Artemis Temko-Skalkottas (b. 27 February 1927). A twin brother Yorgos died within two days of birth. (IntArt 24 February 1996).

58. IntAsk 19.9.1973.

59. IntArt 24.2.1996.

60. LB 8 November 1928.

61. Arriving annually every spring in 1928, 1929 and 1930.

62. Another Schoenberg pupil.

63. LB 4 May 1930, 23 Jan 1932.

64. LB [?]late December 1929.

65. In bold in the original: overwriting of words for rhetorical emphasis is a marked feature of Skalkottas’s epistolary style.

66. LB 4 May 1931.

67. e.g. LB 23 January 1932, when Skalkottas tells Benakis why the A major Violin Sonata of Brahms is called the ‘Meistersinger Sonata’ (because of its opening similarity to Walther’s aria in Wagner’s opera, which he quotes for Benakis.)

68. LB 10-12 Dec. 1928.

69. A theatre in Berlin. The play may have been Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’.

70. LB 10-12 Dec. 1928.

71. LB [?]late Dec. 1929. (The first page or pages are missing, but the date can be inferred from its contents.) Skalkottas had already made a first request on Constantinidis’s behalf in July 1929.

72. IntConst 23.12.1971 and 6.6.1973.

73. LB [?]late Dec. 1929.

74. A/K 6 (Catalogue of the Skalkottas Archive, Athens).

75. Not the published Octet of 1931, A/K 30 ( JP-20 ). The piano octet has left no further trace.

76. Completed two years later, in 1931.

77. Probably ΗΛαφίνα (А/К 86) О ΑλήПааас (А/К 87) and Άστραψε η Ανατολή (Α/Κ 88). All three works were in Perra’s possession before her death. (lntJP 10.12.1971)

78. In 1930-31 Skalkottas assisted with the musical preparation of Erwartung, Gurrelieder, and a radio production of the new Schoenberg opera Von Heute auf Morgen, in which he shared the conducting of the orchestral rehearsals with Schoenberg himself and Rudi Goehr. (See ThornleySchbg).

79. Epic, hieratic drama influenced by ancient models was in the air in Berlin at the time. Schoenberg was working on Moses and Aaron and may have discussed his project with Skalkottas. Egon Wellesz, a Vienna pupil of Schoenberg, was a partisan of ancient Greek drama: his opera Alkestis was first performed in Mannheim in 1924; Die Bacchantinnen was premiered in Vienna in 1931 — both are based on tragedies by Euripides. Ernst Krenek’s opera Das Leben des Orest was performed in Berlin and Leipzig in 1930.

80. Rolf Stein; when Skalkottas was back in touch with Rudi and Walter Goehr in the late 1940s, he asks ‘How’s Rolf — and why am I still waiting for the opera libretti???’ (Letter in German to Rudi Goehr 10 Nov. 1947.) Stein had emigrated to England, as had Walter Goehr. Stein is mentioned as the librettist of the choral work on the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’ referred to in a Skalkottas interview in H Βραδννή, 30 October 1930. This work was apparently based on Paul Raynal’s antiwar drama ‘Le Tombeau sous l’Arc de Triomphe’ (1924). In a German translation (‘Das Grabmal des unbekannten Soldaten’) the play had been performed more than 150 times at the Volksbühne Berlin in the winter season 1926-7. There is no further reference to this choral work in any other document; perhaps it was planned but unfinished. Skalkottas may have known through Schoenberg that Berg had thought of composing a setting of Raynal’s play: Berg mentions the idea in a letter to Schoenberg (10 January 1927).

81. Antonios Skokos, Νέα Εσήα 598, 1 May 1950.

82. Letter to Constantinidis, 9 September 1928.

83. There is no mention of Skalkottas anywhere in Melos for this period, 1927-33. But then no contemporary composer — not even Stravinsky, Bartók or Schoenberg — was honoured with a full Melos article.

84. The claims may have been based on some assurance or encouragement from somewhere — perhaps from Schoenberg. On 6 August 1929 Skalkottas wrote to Constantinidis: ‘I am in negotiations with Wilhelm Hansen Verlag, Copenhagen, and I hope it will turn out satisfactorily. Universal only wanted the Sonatinas, and those not now, but in November.’ (Presumably Skalkottas means the first two Sonatinas for Violin and Piano.) Hansen in Copenhagen and Universal Edition in Vienna were the past and present publishers of Schoenberg, who may have approached them on his pupil’s behalf; neither could find any correspondence with or about Skalkottas when asked in 1973. Alfred Schlee, the Managing Director of Universal, was their Berlin representative in 1929/30, but could not in 1983 recall having had any contact with Skalkottas. (IntSchlee May 1983)

85. Several weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 24/25 October 1929, at the beginning of September, Skalkottas was making applications for grants to the Humboldt Foundation and to Athens University, with a letter of support ‘by Kurt Weill’ (Greek translation, ms dated 5 September 1929, Skalkottas Archives, Athens).

86. LB 1931/32 passim.

87. LB [?]late Dec. 1929: ‘the £8’ cannot be further explained from the context. Eight pounds was no more than 160 Marks at this period (Bidwell. 22-23, 65).

88. Concert on 19 June 1929 at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin.

89. The normally conservative Heinz Pringsheim in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung (5 July 1929) was impressed by the individuality of Schoenberg’s pupils (‘a serious attitude towards music and a technical skill based on contrapuntal studies’), and described the two Sonatinas as ‘not in the least Schoenbergian in flavour - [they] could hail from the polytonal districts of Milhaud.’

90. The concert programme was discovered among Skalkottas’s letters to Benakis during the author’s study of the correspondence in June 1973. Benakis claimed he was in Berlin at that time (IntBen 5.6.1973).

91. 6 April 1930, first performance of the Concerto for Piano and Violin, and of the Little Suite for Orchestra; the soloists were the violinist Anatol Knorre and the Greek pianist Polyxene Mathey. The concert was sponsored by the Greek Embassy in Berlin.

92. 20 May 1930, first performance of the Concerto for Wind Instruments.

93. The sole surviving page of a letter of ?April/May 1930, in which Skalkottas mentions the concert to take place on 20 May: ‘I want to dedicate the Concerto for Winds to you, but I’d like you to hear it first.’

94. He was apparently planning a secret meeting with the pianist Marika Papaioannou in Austria (Letter to Marika Papaioannou, 8 August 1930: see n. 16).

95. In July 1930 (Interview with Benakis, June 1973).

96. LB 17 July 1930.

97. On 27 November 1930, in a concert exclusively consisting of chamber works by Skalkottas, including the First and Second Sonatinas for Violin and Piano, and the First and Second String Quartets.

98. Mitropoulos had (unsuccessfully) tried to obtain a conducting post for Skalkottas with the Athens Conservatoire Orchestra for the 1926/27 season. (Letter to Askitopoulou, 25.7.1925).

99. MZ November 1930, 48.

100. H Βραδυνή 30 October 1930. The article is an interesting portrait of Skalkottas at this time. The (anonymous) journalist remarks on the composer’s seeming more mature than his 26 years, and is impressed by his enthusiasm for all the arts, including cinema, theatre, radio, recording and painting, as well as music.

101. Letter to Marika Papaioannou, 19 June 1930.

102. Quoted by Skalkottas in his article ‘H Μουσικοκριτικη’, Μουσική Ζωη, March 1931, 124-125. Skalkottas does not say from which Greek newspapers or magazines these excerpts are taken, nor name any of the reviewers.

103. LB 16 Feb. 1932.

104. By eight years: Mitropoulos was born 18 February 1896 (Old Style).

105. On 5 June 1927: the twelve-note, three-movement work ‘Ostinata’ for violin and piano, the song cycle ‘10 Inventions’ on poems by Cavafy, and the ‘Passacaglia, Intermezzo and Fugue’ for piano; Mitropoulos played the piano at this recital. See KostiosCat 36, 58, 127. ‘No sense of cultural roots in his music ... aesthetic degeneracy.’ ( Trotter 62-63 citing reviews quoted in KostiosVienna 13). For the musical influence of Mitropoulos on Skalkottas, see ThornlevSchbg 79-80.

106. On 27 January 1929 ( KostiosCat 25). Mitropoulos’s later works, the incidental music to Sophocles’ Electra (1936) and Euripides’ Ippolitos (1937), though less demanding in idiom, were also attacked in the press: Kalomiris suggested that the ‘monotonous’ percussion effects were more redolent of ‘the African jungle than ancient Mycenae’. (Review in Έθνος, Athens, 5.10.1936, quoted in KostiosCat 86). Mitropoulos never composed again, and the attack was one of the main reasons for his emigration from Greece. (Letter of Nelly Evelpidi [née Askitopoulou] to Mitropoulos’s friend and biographer Kaity Katsoyanni, 1.4.1967, quoted in KostiosCat . 86).

107. LB 10 March 1931.

108. According to Benakis’s diary notes (IntBen 5.6.1973].

109. LB 10 March 1931.

110. See n. 102. Skalkottas acted as the Berlin correspondent for Μουσική Ζωή between February and July 1931. The work (almost certainly unpaid) presumably gave Skalkottas a free journalist’s pass to Berlin concerts he wanted to attend.

111. LB 10 March 1931.

112. LB 10 March 1931.

113. Τιά ένα όμως είμαι βέβαιος — Αυτά που συμβαίνουν στήν πρωτεΰουσά μας δεν συμβαίνουν οΰτε εις μίαν φυλην μαΰρων’. (Ή Μουσικοκριτική’, Μονσική Ζωή, March 1931, 124.) Skalkottas had already written dismissively in an article about the concert crisis in Berlin: ‘I don’t know to what extent there is a crisis of concert life in Greece. Musical life there is minimal’. (MZ Feb 1931, 112.)

114. LB 13 August 1931.

115. ‘στου κουφοΰ την πόρτα όσον θέλεις βρόντα’ (LB 17 September 1931).

116. LB 17 February 1932. Konstantinos D. Iconomou was the editor of Μουσική Ζωή.

117. i.e. on 21 January 1931 (LB 23 January 1932).

118. LB 16 February 1932.

119. LB 22 February 1931. We cannot know to what extent Benakis’s decision, made ostensibly for financial reasons, may not also have been influenced by the denunciation of Skalkottas’s music by the Athens critics. If the latter was a factor (and certainly the timing appears strikingly coincidental) then to judge from Skalkottas’s letters, Benakis was tactful enough to conceal it, and his own dislike of Skalkottas’s Concerto for Winds, until July 1932 (LB 12 July 1932).

120. LB 22 February 1931.

121. LB 23 January 1932, 16 February 1932.

122. LB [May-June] 1931.

123. LB 23 June 1932.

124. In September 1931, which effectively devalued by about 25% the money in pounds sterling that Benakis had sent Skalkottas for business purposes.

125. In LB 25 July 1931 Skalkottas writes that auction sales have been halted because of the German economic crisis.

126. LB 13 April 1931.

127. By 1930 there was 33% unemployment among cinema musicians; in March 1930, UFA, the largest Berlin film production and distribution company, sacked all its remaining orchestral musicians and conductors and replaced them with a small ‘flying division’. The other company, EMELKA, cut their orchestras of 70 musicians to 6 jazz musicians, one organist, and one conductor (Kurt London: ‘Kinoorchester und Tonfilm’, Melos Nr. 9, 1930, 247).

128. LB 19 March 1932.

129. LB late December 1929, 23 January 1932, and other letters of 1931/32.

130. LB 10 March 1931. (Also see n. 45.)

131. LB 26 October 1931, 5 March 1932: ‘Have I ever complained about the present results of those past overnight stays in the various cabarets? Here as well, does friendship play no part?’ Also LB 12 July 1932: ‘If I have showed extreme impudence to others, that was the result of my bad health... indisputably the consequence of our many fine nocturnal amusements.’

132. In LB of 17 July 1930 and 30 September 1932 Skalkottas refers to joint visits by himself and his patron to the nightclubs ‘Resi’ and ‘Hölle’. ‘Resi’ is a popular Austrian diminutive for ‘Therese’, and might have been a cabaret visited in Vienna in the summer of 1928, 1929 or 1930, or (more likely) a cabaret in Berlin. In his letter of 17 July 1930 Skalkottas had insisted that if Benakis revisited Germany, he would refuse to accompany him to night-clubs such as ‘Resi’ and ‘Hölle.’

133. It certainly seems that Skalkottas contracted some form of venereal disease in the summer of 1930 in Berlin or Vienna. He first mentions these symptoms in LB 22 Feb. 1931.

134. LB 26 May 1931, June 1931.

135. LB 26 October 1931.

136. LB 3 November 1931.

137. LB 2 January 1933: ‘My health is much better now’ (see p. 211). But photographs taken in Athens 1933-49 indicate that Skalkottas was prone to periodic skin infections that may have had their origin in the earlier illness.

138. IntVerd 3.7.1973.

139. LB 15 December 1932. Skalkottas says he has been receiving these letters for two years; he insists they cannot have been written by his mother ‘since she cannot read or write’.

140. ‘Have you changed your mind now or have you forgotten???’ (LB 23 January 1932).

141. LB 17 December 1931.

142. LB The letters of 1931-32 passim make it clear that Benakis had transferred 16,000 Marks for his transactions in Berlin.

143. LB 23 January 1932.

144. LB 26 October 1931.

145. 2 June 1931, Preussische Akademie der Künste, conducted by Erich Schmid.

146. LB 26 May 1931.

147. LB May-June 1931.

148. Schoenberg was absent from May 1931 to June 1932 ( Stuckenschmidt, Hans-Heinz, Schönberg. Leben. Umwelt. Werk, Zürich 1974, 311, 316)Google Scholar.

149. LB 26 October 1931: ‘but I don’t know if I shall finish it: everything depends on my health.’

150. LB 22 September 1932.

151. LB 2 February 1932.

152. LB 27 February 1932.

153. i.e. from Athens.

154. LB 11 May 1929, in which Skalkottas writes the word ‘άσματα’ (‘songs’, the word also used for ‘chants’ e.g. Orthodox plainchants) with a playful backwards curve connecting the ‘t’ back to the intial ‘a’. Skalkottas evidently knew something of Byzantine neumatic notation.

155. Since Skalkottas returns constantly but grudgingly to the idea that he should make arrangements of Greek folk music, this was evidently Benakis’s own suggestion — apparently made repeatedly in conversation and correspondence. Skalkottas’s sporadically expressed interest in Greek affairs and Greek folk music in LB 1929-31 was at least partly motivated by the idea of seeming to respond to Benakis’s enthusiasms, to persuade his ex-patron into supporting him financially again. By 1932, Skalkottas’s increasing obsession with the Greek Dances project and with returning to Greece may have been prompted by an urge to escape from his poverty and isolation in Berlin. But he was certainly sincere in his nostalgic desire for a reconciliation with his compatriots and his search for popular recognition, though he may also have been partly impelled by a guilty wish to make reparation to Benakis for the misspent funds, in the form of a musical offering — indeed, of a self-immolation, for any return to Athens can only have appeared to Skalkottas in this light, given his experiences and views. The irrational and vacillating tone of many letters of 1932 suggest that this self-destructive streak was largely unconscious.

156. The author’s thematic catalogue of the works of Skalkottas, in preparation, contains a breakdown of melodic sources of the 36 Greek Dances, AK 11.

157. LB 17 December 1931.

158. LB 22 September 1931.

159. A quotation, whether conscious or not, of Christ’s words at the Marriage Feast at Cana (John 2:4), showing that Skalkottas had a definite sense of his musical mission. (See also n. 141; for another biblical reference from the same Gospel, see n. 10.)

160. LB 17 December 1931.

161. LB ?mid-January 1932.

162. LB 27 February 1932.

163. i.e. in August 1922, after the massacre in Smyrna that ended the war against Turkey with a humiliating defeat for the Greeks.

164. Theotokas (under the pseudonym Ορέστης Διγενης), Ελεύθερο Πνενμα, Athens 1929, Εκδ. Ερμης 1973, 41, 63.

165. ibid., Chapter 3 title heading, and 37-56 passim.

166. Ibid., 10. Skalkottas was in Athens from the autumn of 1930 to the beginning of January 1931. He may well have read Theotokas’s book, and must certainly have heard about it at the time; it had created quite a stir immediately after publication.

167. Ironically, Theotokas disliked demanding modern music, and had a particular aversion for the music of Skalkottas (Interview with Nelly Askitopoulou, 19.9.1973).

168. Kostis Palamas, the outstanding Greek poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

169. Skalkottas evidently means Mitropoulos and himself.

170. LB [mid-January] 1932.

171. LB 26 October 1931.

172. A Greek colloquial expression meaning: ‘Don’t take up such an extreme position’, ‘let’s meet halfway’, or ‘let’s agree to differ’.

173. LB 17 December 1931.

174. LB 17 September 1931. With the ironic use of the insulting epithet ‘left-wing’ Skalkottas may well be quoting Benakis.

175. ‘Φρικταπαίσιο’, obviously a term Benakis had used in one of his angry letters. The Concerto for Winds had been dedicated to Benakis, and its composition had been one of Skalkottas’s main occupations in 1928-29, making Benakis’s attack on it all the more hurtful.

176. i.e. from the year Benakis began to support Skalkottas financially.

177. Skalkottas uses the term ‘εν τάξει’, meaning ‘O.K.’: a deliberate understatement.

178. LB 12 July 1932.

179. Margarita Perra (also known as Margherita Perras) studied in Berlin and became a member of the ensemble of the Berlin State Opera. Skalkottas considered her a loyal friend and colleague. Her brother, Telemachos Perras, a surgeon in Berlin, later in Athens, was the doctor who operated on Skalkottas on the day he died, 19 September 1949.

180. Later references in the letters indicate that one of the songs must have been ‘H Λαφίνα’ (‘The Doe’) which he had already arranged two years earlier, in 1929 (see n. 77). The melody was later used in one of the 36 Greek Dances (Makedonikos, No. 11 of Set 2).

181. Broadcast on 15 December 1931, Berlin Radio.

182. Skalkottas’s tonal Greek Suite for piano (1924) uses Greek folk-idioms. Skalkottas orchestrated Mitropoulos’s Cretan Feast-day (Κρητική Γιορτή) for its first performance in Athens on 11 March 1928. (Athens Conservatoire concert programmes for 1928, also KostiosCat 48.)

183. LB 17 December 1931. Skalkottas’s own quotation marks emphasise this solemn declaration of intent. The reference to a ‘new content’ implies that Skalkottas is planning to go beyond the tonal arrangement of folk songs (e.g. the Greek Dances) and is already conceiving works combining folk and modern idioms, anticipating the Greek folk dance movements from the ‘32 Piano Pieces’ (1940), the Kalamatianos finale of the ‘Ten Sketches for Strings’ (?1940), and the music for ‘The Spell of May’ (1944).

184. The Melpo Merlier folk song recording project, supported by the Venizelos Government, had begun in Athens on 23 October 1930, to prominent international press coverage, during Skalkottas’s previous visit to Athens. In 1934 Skalkottas made transcriptions for the Merlier Archives. (Records of the Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών, Athens, also see Dragoumis ).

185. See n. 33. Venizelos willed his private papers and letters to the Benakis Museum; they are now kept in the Benakis Archive in Kifissia.

186. i.e. since May 1929 when he had asked Benakis to send him published folk music collections.

187. ‘... με τους Ρωμιοΰς’. Skalkottas here deliberately uses a traditional folk word for ‘Greek’.

188. LB undated [?mid-January 1932].

189. i.e. professionally, in Athens.

190. i.e. the Greek Nation. By 1932 the phrase had become the slogan of nationalists. It is difficult to associate Skalkottas with this rather inflated chauvinism. It could be desperate opportunism, or perhaps he had become so hungry for a rapport with his compatriots that he had begun to use such ‘patriotic’ terms in preparation for a role in Athens as a ‘Greek’ composer. (See also n. 155).

191. LB 23 March 1932.

192. LB undated [mid-January 1932]. The Olympia Theatre was the main venue for symphony concerts in Athens at this time.

193. No. 4 of Set I of the 36 Greek Dances. Curiously, in the score he gave Benakis in December 1936, Skalkottas wrote the date ‘January 1931’ against this dance. It is probably a mistake for January 1932 — which according to his letters to Benakis is when he began to conceive and sketch the Dances, after the ‘Griechische Stunde’ broadcast recital. (Possibly though he had played an improvised arrangement of the song on the piano at the Benakis house in Athens in January 1931, before he left for Berlin.)

194. LB 23 March 1932.

195. Skalkottas uses (perhaps ironically) a solemn German phrase ‘die Feierliche Versöhnung’.

196. During the whole of 1932 Skalkottas mentions no other compositions but the Greek Dances. Schoenberg was absent from Berlin from May 1931 until June 1932, and as Skalkottas was only a guest participant in Schoenberg’s composition class in late 1932, his works for 1932 are not listed by Schoenberg. (Frequenznachweise, Meisterklasse der Akademie der Künste, Sommersemester 1932, manuscript notes by Schoenberg.) As the class was dissolved in or before March 1933, Schoenberg wrote no notes for the half-year winter term 1932-3.

197. 25 July 1931. What Schoenberg’s point of difference with Skalkottas might have been we do not know. Skalkottas had not yet started to arrange or transcribe Greek folk-songs, and his views and music were in a consistently neo-classical, serial line from 1927 until the autumn of 1931, so Schoenberg could scarcely accuse him of apostasy. Possibly Skalkottas was deliberately embroidering or even inventing the disagreement with his teacher, since Benakis heartily disliked Schoenberg and his music.

198. 12 July 1932.

199. Apparently in LB 25 July 1931.

200. Skalkottas uses the German word ‘primitiv’.

201. The German word ‘undankbar’.

202. The circumstances of this misunderstanding are unknown.

203. An appointment that shows Schoenberg’s paternal interest — Skalkottas could never have paid for such a studio session at this time.

204. LB 12 July 1932. Schoenberg’s criticism of his pupil, always amark of distinction, may have related to Skalkottas’s idiosyncratic use of serial and twelve-note technique. See ThornlevSchbg for a more detailed account.

205. LB [mid-January 1932].

206. ibid.

207. LB 17 December 1931.

208. As their mutual mistrust increased, Benakis demanded that Skalkottas return his letters. Skalkottas replied sarcastically, ‘I beg you to tear up my own [letters], so they don’t appear in some piece of musical criticism or as the plot of some novel or film.’ (LB 11 June 1932.)

209. LB 19 August 1932. It appears Benakis never resumed the correspondence.

210. ‘με яауібєс καλλιτεχνικές’.

211. Skalkottas is evidently referring here to conversations with Benakis that took place in Athens on 21 January 1931, on the eve of his departure for Berlin (LB 23 January 1932; see nn. 117-120).

212. Apparently advisors and business associates of Benakis.

213. LB 23 June 1932. This is the bitterest outburst of Skalkottas’s entire correspondence with Benakis.

214. LB 29 August 1932. His orchestration manual was written later in Athens, ca. 1940.

215. An interesting shift of viewpoint, for in his letter of 12 July 1932, only two months previously, he had claimed that he never wanted to retouch previous compositions.

216. The melody of the well-known folk song became one of the 32 Greek Dances: Set I No. 9. (See also p. 207.)

217. LB 30 September 1932.

218. Konstantinos Skalkottas, b. Chalkis 25 Sept. 1874, d. Athens 27 Sept. 1932 (Information from the Lixiarcheion in Chalkis and in Athens). Skalkottas’s sister Kiki described her brother’s grief at their uncle’s death (IntVerd 30.5.1973).

219. IntAsk 19.9.1973. Skalkottas had moved back to Frau Fischer’s at Nürnbergerstrasse 19 on 25 August 1932 (LB 29 August 1932). This had been his first Berlin West End apartment in November 1928, rented with the aid of his new grant from Benakis, after he returned from Athens.

220. No other relationship of Skalkottas is ever mentioned in the letters to Benakis except that with Matla Temko, who must surely be intended here. Their child Artemis was still in the care of a foster-mother in Berlin.

221. 25 December: see also n. 246.

222. ‘Να “χαρείς ότι αγαπάς, γράψε μου !” ‘ The source of the curiously punctuated quotation is unknown, and the meaning of the phrase obscure: perhaps it is a private joke, a line from a play or a musical work he and Benakis had visited together? ‘χαρείς’ in other contexts can mean ‘Please!’ and that could be the intended underlying meaning here: ‘Please write to me!’

223. In this dramatically understated letter, important news (a marriage plan, a demand for renewed friendship) is relayed in a laconic, subdued way. Its banality of phrase and its repetitiousness, the tone wavering between intimacy and aggressive detachment, suggests that the writer was probably intoxicated, or extremely depressed, or both.

224. IntBen 5.6.1973, also LB June 1932-Jan.l933 passim.

225. Before leaving Berlin, Skalkottas gave a chest containing the manuscripts of his compositions to Ortmann, a music dealer in Charlottenburg, for safekeeping until his return. In 1955, at the instigation of the opera singer Thanos Bourlos, who had lived in Berlin during the Second World War and had then been told about these manuscripts by Ortmann, four works were recovered from Berlin by the pianist George Hadjinikos: the Octet, the First and Second String Quartets, and the [First] Piano Concerto (Bourlos 127-131, IntJP 10.12.1971, IntHadj 13.4.1972).

226. Int Artemis Lindal: Matla Temko left Berlin in March 1933; she and Skalkottas never met again; nor did he ever again see his daughter.

227. Whether in Berlin, or at the Greek border, or later in Athens, is unclear (IntAsk 19.9.1973, IntVerd 3.7.1973).

228. LB 5 March, 22 May 1932.

229. Whether Benakis ever recovered his manuscripts or his money from Frau Fischer is unknown. In our interview (IntBen 5.6.1973) he refused to discuss the matter.

230. A four-room apartment at 43 Thermopylon Street in central Athens, not far from Omonia Square (IntVerd 3.7.1973).

231. One exception was Spiros Farandatos, who invited him to help in the summer as an examiner in the diploma examinations at the Athens Conservatoire. Skalkottas refused (IntVerd 1.10.1973).

232. IntVerd 3.7.1973, 1.10.73. He had already planned this course of action in Berlin (LB 30 September 1932).

233. All friends and acquaintances of Skalkottas with whom the author spoke in 1972-73 knew of the ‘mistake’ Skalkottas had made in ‘misappropriating’ Benakis’s money. None — even intimate friends such as Nelly Askitopoulou-Evelpidi) apparently knew of the extenuating circumstances revealed in the letters, which suggests that in Athens after 1933 Skalkottas did not speak about the matter or try to explain himself. Possibly Benakis warned off any social acquaintances he thought had been or might be approached for help by Skalkottas? In any case, even if the political and economic conditions in Greece had not been enough to dissuade a potential patron between 1933 and 1936, Skalkottas’s denunciation of Athens musical life in 1931 would have been enough to make him persona non grata there (Campbell and Sherrard, Modern Greece, London, 1968, 155-159, also see n. 126).

234. IntAsk 19.9.1973. It is uncertain for how long his passport remained confiscated.

235. IntVerd 3.7.1973, 1.10.73. Skalkottas probably did not learn for months (perhaps even for years) of Schoenberg’s dismissal from the Prussian Academy (March 1933) and enforced emigration (May 1933), both happening after Skalkottas left Berlin.

236. Letter to Matla Temko, 27 November 1935.

237. Letter to Rudi Goehr, 11 September 1945, in Greek. Skalkottas had already considered emigrating to the USA in 1926 (IntAsk 9.2.72, and Letter to Nelly Askitopoulou 11 November 1925). In a further letter to Rudi Goehr, 10 November 1947 (in German), Skalkottas, by now married and a father, wrote: ‘I think it would have been better for me if I had gone to America back then [i.e. 1925/26]. I could not bring myself to undertake such a long journey, and sometimes it has seemed so funny that I had made the long journey to Germany. I’ve been working [in Athens] since 1934, without a pause, day and night. Just imagine, I haven’t managed to save even a little money... the reason is surely the bad tempo of these times.’

238. 21 January 1934.

239. e.g. Ioannis Psaroudas in Ελεύθερον Βήμα, Jan. 1934: ‘When a few years ago Mr Skalkottas was presented as a composer at the symphony concerts, he was judged quite severely, and rightly in my view... I am happy today to confirm that, when he wants to, this musician can compose in a delightful way... the performance... was warmly applauded.’

240. ‘In January 1934’ (Letter to Matla Temko, 27 November 1935), though the first mention of Skalkottas’s name in the Athens Conservatoire Orchestra’s orchestral register is on 19 March 1934 (AthConsLE). Skalkottas began on the first desk of the first violins, second only to the leader, but gradually moved back: either of his own volition, ‘to avoid orchestral politics’ (IntVerd 1.10.1973) or was moved back to make way for younger and more tractable players. The Orchestra of the Athens Conservatoire was renamed the Athens State Orchestra on 29.5.1943 (Anoyannakis 562).

241. IntVerd 3.7.1973. Perhaps to conceal the fact that he was still composing twelve-note music after the success of the popular Greek Dances, Skalkottas claimed ‘I composed this Suite in 1929 in Berlin’ (Skalkottas Archive, A/K 3a, MSS β2, β6). His letter to Matla Temko after completing the Suite (27.11.1935) makes it clear that in Berlin he had only ‘sketched out the themes’ for the work.

242. In late February 1933, a few days before Skalkottas returned to Athens, six members of the Greek Composers’ Union, including Manolis Kalomiris, bought space in the Athens daily newspapers to protest against the election of Dimitri Mitropoulos as a composer to the Academy of Athens, on the grounds that his compositions were unworthy of the honour, ‘with regard to quality and quantity’. (KostiosBiog 51/52)

243. Skalkottas may have been unaware that Schoenberg had been forced out of Germany by the Nazis in May 1933, but had probably learnt from Schacht, with whom he had corresponded (Letter to Matla Temko, 27 November 1935. See also n. 2.)

244. ibid., original in German. On reading this long, angry letter, it becomes clear that one of the main reasons for Skalkottas’s depression on returning to Athens had to do, not with his problems in Berlin, but with his aversion to living and working in Athens; from the very start he despised the conditions in the Athens orchestra. Skalkottas’s sister (IntVerd 1.10.1973) recalls her brother’s constant cry in 1933-34 of ‘I want to leave!’

245. Letter to Matla Temko, 27 November 1935.

246. For Manolis’s name-day, 25^th December, but more usually celebrated on 26 December; in Greece presents were (and still are) given on the name-day rather than at Christmas or on birthdays.

247. Benakis showed me the full score during our interview in 1973. It is now in the Benakis Archive, Kifissia, bequeathed by Benakis on his death. The present whereabouts of the Skalkottas letters to Benakis are unknown; they are not in the Benakis Archive, according to curator Mrs Valentini Tsellika (Interview, 19 Nov. 1999).

248. IntBen 5.6.1973. The contents of the letter (dated 24 December 1936) are unknown. According to his own explanation, Benakis had given it away ‘to a cousin who collected autograph manuscripts’. Skalkottas would surely have appreciated the dramatic irony. (See also nn. 7 and 8.)

249. ibid.