Nikos Skalkottas

Nikos Skalkottas went to Berlin as a violinist and came home a composer almost nobody played. Born in Chalkis in 1904 and raised in Athens, he took the Athens Conservatory's highest distinction in violin, and a scholarship carried him to Berlin, where he studied composition with Philipp Jarnach and then, decisively, with Arnold Schoenberg. He returned to Greece in 1933 and earned his living for the rest of his life as a rank-and-file orchestral violinist, composing steadily while the music went almost entirely unheard. The catalogue moves between serial, freely atonal and frankly tonal writing without ever settling into a system; the Thirty-Six Greek Dances put regional melodies through an orchestral imagination that neither prettifies them nor leaves them as folklore. He died in Athens in 1949, at forty-five, and the greater part of the music was found, edited and performed only afterwards — a posthumous career still being assembled. His first violin teachers were his father and his uncle Kostas Skalkottas, and an Averoff Foundation scholarship took him to Berlin in 1921, where he played in Willy Hess's class at the Prussian Academy of Arts before deciding in 1923 to compose instead; Robert Kahn, Paul Juon and Kurt Weill taught him as well, and he sat in Schoenberg's masterclass from 1927 to 1932 beside Marc Blitzstein and Roberto Gerhard. In the mid-1930s he worked at the Folk Music Archive in Athens, putting Greek folk songs into Western notation for the musicologist Melpo Merlier, and the neglected hernia that killed him ruptured shortly before the birth of his second son.