Chapter Twelve

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Following the Leader: Manolis Kalomiris

That a bridge between East and West – between Asia and Europe – might assume a concrete political form was considered a realistic possibility by many in the . The Balkan Wars had already resulted in territorial expansion for – opposed ­incidentally by a strengthening Communist Party – and a corresponding contraction for the Ottomans. During World War I, the promise of a further step, allowing Greece to turn some of its Asia Minor settlements into territorial acquisitions, was apparently dangled by the Entente Powers before the then Prime Minister, . And when the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) licensed the provisional occupation of by Greece (as well as eastern Thrace and the islands of and Imvros), the ‘great idea’ of Greek irredentism seemed at last within reach. Richard Clogg reminds us that Venizelos’s supporters spoke openly at the time of a ‘Greece of the two continents and five seas’.1 A greater Greece had been a long-standing dream, but it was only when Venizelos came to power in 1910 – in the wake of the Young Turk revolu- tion (which generally sharpened the focus of Balkan nationalisms) and the ‘Goudi coup’ of the Military League – that it was placed on the political agenda. The Venizelos ascendancy initially energised the political nation through a twin programme of domestic reform and territorial expansion- ism. But in due course his agenda proved divisive (the Royalists, as well as the Communists, took a negative view of his expansionist plans), and it was increasingly prey to the manoeuvres of Great Power politics and the unforeseeable events of war. It ended in the ‘catastrophe’ of 1922, as the forces of Turkish nationalism destroyed Smyrna and routed the Greeks of Asia Minor. This was the political background to the rise of the ‘national school’ of Greek composers, so labelled by Kalomiris in his ‘manifesto’ of 1908. Kalo- miris’s return to from Kharkov [Kharkiv] in 1910 coincided with

1 Clogg 1992, 95. join the club 303 the rise to power of Venizelos. He began teaching at the Conservatoire shortly after, and his ambitions for Greek music formed in many respects a cultural counterpart to Venizelian goals.2 It is likely that the support of Venizelos was crucial in promoting his career in Athens, though it was equally a guarantee of later hostility from anti-Venizelian circles. If we bear in mind, too, that Kalomiris was from Smyrna, we can see that the Greek nation for which he offered such powerful cultural propaganda in his polemical writings and activities from 1910 onwards was indeed a nation ‘of the two continents’. The mix of idealism and power-broking involved in his anti-Ionian cam- paigns might stand as an object lesson in the politics of culture. It was a strategic alliance between Kalomiris and Nazos that blocked the appoint- ment of Spiros Samaras, the leading figure in Greek music at the time, to the Directorship of the Conservatory in succession to Nazos. It hardly helped that Samaras was a royalist rather than a Venizelist. Yet none of these allegiances would prove permanent. Samaras fell out of favour with the Royals due to the perceived ideology of his only ‘Greek’ opera Rhea,3 and, as we noted in chapter 9, the harmony between Kalomiris and Nazos also turned out to be short-lived. Their true interests had never really coin- cided, and the gulf between them as musicians could have been measured in light years. When Kalomiris consolidated his position he lost no time in dissociating himself from Nazos. There was another dimension of cultural politics involved in Kalo- miris’s campaign. Already prior to his engagement with Venizelian ideals, he had committed to the (demoticist) anti-katharevousa language reform associated with a progressive intelligentsia.4 Although they were not all in sympathy with his Venizelian views, the demoticists adopted Kalomiris as a powerful representative in the musical world, and he in turn valued his association with them, especially with (whose text for the Olympic Hymn, ironically enough, was set by Samaras).5 Demoticist ideals had a particular context within Greek history, but they also harmonised with wider programmes of cultural nationalism. Within such programmes

2 Frangou-Psychopedis 1990; Belonis 2009. 3 Belonis 2009. 4 This commitment was strengthened by his reading of Yiannis Psycharis’s seminal autobiography, To taxidi mou [My Journey], published in 1888, while a student in . Note that the ‘demotic’ was a construction with some capacity to unify the different regions of Greece. 5 Other younger figures included (1883–1957) and Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951).