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MANOS HADJIDAKIS Magnus Eroticus
[Voice and Piano]
EPN 105
ISMN M-69151-082-7
Pages: 92
Size: 235 x 320 mm
"Magnus Eroticus" is a popular god, who lives in our imagination from the moment we are born until we die - beautiful, youthful and perpetualy alive.
"Magnus Eroticus" does not wear picturesque local garments. He wears his own, composing difficult combinations of sounds, aethereal colours and poetic dreams. Not containing messages easily erased by the rains, not resisting at all.
Start off with a song
and in its chanted airs
bow your heads together
and sing along with me.
The sequence followed by these poems of the Greek poets forms an unbroken cycle of songs, a liturgical mass for "Magnus Eroticus" - rather like the vesper services for saints in distant deserted chapels, where imaginary angels, lovers, virgins and adolescents participate. This is a curious Mass and yet extremely natural, in our secret inner life.
I have endeavoured to create simple songs, but not easy ones. This is why I carefully chose the singers who would interpret them. First of all, Fleury Dandonaki, for her passion, her rare voice and her inner intensity; and Dimitris Psarianos, who is unaffected, youthful and genuinely popular. In my opinion, the way both of them sing the "Magnus Eroticus", is a lesson in character, truth and magic in the field of popular song.
With all this, I am addressing the secretmost sensitivity of young people of all ages, rather than ephemeral, uncontrolled sources of excitement.
These songs are not sensual. They function beyond the act, in the deep feeling characteristic of any relationship whatsoever (in any form whatsoever), as long as it contains the prerequisites for human communication.
"Magnus Eroticus" is a series of popular songs, written first and foremost in order that I myself might communicate with all the Greek characters I deeply love - those I have known, those I will come to know and those I will never be able to know. And furthermore, in order that all this might enable me to become united with the soul of my native land in an immortal erotic Greek liturgy.
M. H.
Athens, November 28th, 1972
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