Pioneer of electronic music, Oscar winner, composer of the music for films such as “The Hour of the Victor” and “Blade Runner” – with Vangelis one of the greats has left the world stage. He died on Tuesday, as has now become known.
From a small Greek town to a world music star: Vangelis, whose real name is Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, was considered one of the pioneers of electronic music. He became world famous with catchy compositions for films such as “The Hour of the Victor”, “Blade Runner” or “1492 – The Conquest of Paradise” – Henry Maske once ran into the boxing arena to the Vangelis song “Conquest of Paradise”. Vangelis died in a French hospital on Tuesday, Greek media reported on Thursday evening, citing the musician’s lawyer. “The mighty composer is dead,” was the headline in the To Proto Thema newspaper.
The career of the stubborn genius began in the 1960s when the band Forminx made young Greeks go hysterical. The soul of the five-man combo was a boy with a distinctive beard: Evangelos Papathanassiou. Back then, nobody could have guessed that the young musician from the central Greek port city of Volos would win the Oscar around 15 years later for composing the soundtrack for the film “Chariots of Fire” (“The Hour of the Victor”) and one day as one of the most famous musicians in the world world would apply.
Vangelis actually wanted to be a painter and studied at the Academy in Athens. He taught himself music. In 1968 he moved to Paris and celebrated his first successes there with the Greek musicians Demis Roussos and Loukas Sideras. Together they formed the group Aphrodite’s Child. Vangelis composed the music for the LP “666”, which is considered a classic of progressive rock. In 1973 Vangelis started his solo career and experimented with electronic music. After the Oscar for “Chariots of Fire” came success after success, including the soundtracks for “Blade Runner” and “1492: The Conquest of Paradise”. At the beginning of the new millennium, Vangelis began experimenting with orchestral music. In 2002 he composed the music for the soccer World Cup in Korea and Japan. The best work of his new orchestral music is the “Mythodea” with choral sections.
Although many see Vangelis as a pioneer, he remained humble – glamorous parties and big performances were not his thing. In recent years in particular, he has become very shy of the public. He paints a lot and dedicates himself to icon painting, his lawyer said in 2018 when Vangelis was asked for an interview on his 75th birthday. He greets all his fans, it said.
In 2019, Vangelis gave one of his rare interviews. When asked about electronic music and new technologies, he told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini: “The avant-garde is not in the instruments, but in the people. Example: you can write a sentence or a mathematical equation in the sand with your finger and type the same sentence or equation on a modern computer. The meaning will be exactly the same.” (dpa)