Abstract
On August 26th, 1943, Greek composer Dimitrios Levidis documented a professional triumph in his journal: “This afternoon I finished the orchestration of my Iliad, the first official performance of which is scheduled for the evening of September 14, in the ancient theater of Herodes Atticus under the Acropolis… unless events of extreme violence delay us until the next day!” Levidis’ L’iliade, written during the brutal Axis occupation of Athens, is a massive, symphonic choral-orchestra work, set to an adaptational text of Homer’s Iliad. My dissertation explores this previously unknown work, situating it within the broader context not only of musical adaptations of Greco-Roman antiquity, but also music composed during wartime. Drawing on scholarship in modern Greek history and literature, ethnomusicology, and memory and trauma studies, this study is framed through four overlapping thematic lenses. Firstly, I provide a survey of musical and theatrical Iliadic adaptations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; secondly, I examine Levidis’ musical language in comparison to both contemporary compositional styles and Greek and Balkan folk music; thirdly, I focus on Athens as both a literal and conceptual battlefield in the context of World War II; and finally, I broaden my scope to examine other contemporary pieces written to commemorate cities devastated by war, including music for Coventry, Leningrad, and Hiroshima. With this work, I enrich the discourse surrounding this little-known composer, bring greater attention to a subfield of musicology outside of the Anglophone sphere, and shed further light on the power of music as a cathartic process in times of despair.