Maria Farantouri

Maria Farantouri was born in Athens on 28 November 1947. As a teenager she sang in the choir of the Society of Friends of Greek Music, a setting where young composers and performers were exploring new possibilities for Greek song. Her low voice brought her from the choir into solo singing. She became a close collaborator of Mikis Theodorakis, whose settings of poetry connected concert performance with literary language. The Mauthausen song cycle, with words by the survivor and writer Iakovos Kambanellis, became a defining part of her repertoire in the 1960s.

After the military coup of 1967 she left Greece and based herself in Paris. While Theodorakis’s music was banned at home, her concerts abroad supported opposition to the dictatorship and made Greek songs part of an international democratic campaign. She returned to Greece after the dictatorship ended in 1974. Her later career expanded through collaborations with musicians from different traditions. In 2011 ECM released Athens Concert with the American saxophonist Charles Lloyd; the recording brought Greek material into dialogue with a jazz ensemble. Her work with Cihan Türkoğlu on Beyond the Borders extended this collaborative approach. Her public career continues through concerts and interviews, including an ERT conversation broadcast in 2026.

Farantouri’s work is interpretation: composers and poets provide the music and words, while she shapes how a listener meets them. The Mauthausen cycle is a clear example. Theodorakis composed the music and Kambanellis supplied poems grounded in his experience as a prisoner in the Nazi camp. Its historical subject deserves attention in its own right, alongside the cycle’s later place in concerts against dictatorship. Farantouri’s sustained phrases and low register give the words space, and the relationship between a sung poem and an audience is central to her artistic identity.

Her recordings also show how broad that identity is. In Eleni Karaindrou’s Elegy of the Uprooting, released on audio in 2006, her voice joins music for film and theatre, orchestra and choir. Athens Concert, released in 2011, brings Greek songs and traditional material together with Charles Lloyd’s jazz group. Beyond the Borders, recorded in 2017 and released by ECM in 2019, joins her with Cihan Türkoğlu and a cross-cultural instrumental ensemble. Its programme includes Greek material alongside other languages and traditions. A learner should choose an identified Greek track for language listening. The Greek title Δύο κόσμοι μια αγκαλιά (Two Worlds, One Embrace) provides an immediate small example: numbers, ordinary nouns and a musical image of connection.

Use the track list for Beyond the Borders to find Δύο κόσμοι μια αγκαλιά. Say its title aloud and match δύο κόσμοι with the singular ένας κόσμος, then μια αγκαλιά with the plural δύο αγκαλιές. The title is enough for this small grammar task. Next read Farantouri’s Greek ERT interview of April 2018 and find the words δημοκρατία, αγάπη and ελπίδα. Choose one and make a personal sentence, such as Η μουσική μού δίνει ελπίδα. Listen to an identified Greek performance and describe the voice in your own words: χαμηλή, δυνατή or ήρεμη. This route connects an actual song title and spoken cultural reflection with useful Modern Greek, while keeping the history behind the repertoire visible.

• She began in a choir before becoming a soloist.
• Mauthausen combines Theodorakis’s music with Kambanellis’s words.
• Beyond the Borders was recorded in 2017 and released by ECM in 2019.