Nikos Skalkottas

Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949) was a Greek composer of 20th-century classical music. A member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition. Skalkottas was born in Chalcis on the island of Euboea. He started violin lessons with his father and uncle Kostas Skalkottas at the age of five, three years after his family moved to Athens. He continued studying violin with Tony Schulze at the Athens Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1920 with a diploma of high distinction. The following year a scholarship from the Averoff Foundation enabled him to study abroad. From 1921 to 1933, he lived in Berlin, where he first took violin lessons at the Prussian Academy of Arts with Willy Hess. Deciding in 1923 to give up his career as a violinist and become a composer, he studied composition with Robert Kahn, Paul Juon, Kurt Weill and Philipp Jarnach. Between 1927 and 1932, he was a member of Arnold Schoenberg's Masterclass in Composition at the Academy of Arts, where his fellow pupils included Marc Blitzstein, Roberto Gerhard and Norbert von Hannenheim. In 1930, Skalkottas devoted considerable effort to having some of his works performed in Athens, but they were met with incomprehension, and even in Berlin his few performances did not make much better headway. In 1933, he was forced by poverty and debt to return to Athens, remaining in Greece for the rest of his life. Skalkottas sought other means of funding through scholarships or paid work as an orchestral player, but he was quickly disillusioned with the state of musical affairs in Athens at the time. Until his death he earned a living as a back-desk violinist in the Athens Conservatory, Radio and Opera orchestras. In the mid-1930s, he worked at the Folk Music Archive in Athens, and did transcriptions of Greek folk songs into Western-music scores for the musicologist Melpo Merlier. As a composer he worked alone, but wrote prolifically, mainly in his very personal post-Schoenbergian idiom that had little chance of being comprehended by the Greek musical establishment. He did secure some performances, especially of some of the Greek Dances and a few of his more tonal works, but the vast bulk of his music went unheard. In 1949, at the age of 45 and shortly before the birth of his second son, he died of what appears to have been the rupture of a neglected common hernia, leaving some symphonic works with incomplete orchestration, and many completed works that were given posthumous premieres.