Hans Keller, Nikos Skalkottas and the notion of symphonic genius This insightful remark, albeit biased by the perennial romanticized mythology surrounding the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949), summarises Hans Keller’s admiration for perhaps one of the twentieth-century’s most ignored and misunderstood musical figures. Norman Lebrecht ’s entry in The Companion to 20th Century Music encapsulates Skalkottas’s image as ‘a pupil of Schoenberg, who returned to Athens with a gospel no-one wanted to hear, played violin for a pittance and died at 45’.2 Yet in the 1920s Skalkottas was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg between 1927 and 1932.3 It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that he became an anonymous and obscure figure, who lost touch with Schoenberg and his circle and worked in complete isolation until his death in 1949. | Issue |
