Music in the Footsteps of El Greco

A few kilometers west of Candia, the Arab, Byzantine, Venetian, Turkish and Greek city we today call Irakleio, there is a small village called Fodele. Famous for its orange groves, hidden in a beautiful valley crossed by a little river, shaded with gigantic sycamores, this village is a little paradise in a small corner of this big, arid island. Just outside the village, next to an ancient Byzantine church, there is a little cluster of buildings that still today is called “Ta Theotokiana” (the place of the Theotokopouloses). The local lore, and the local store owners will tell you why: this is the place where Dominikos Theotokopoulos, the great Greek-Spanish painter El Greco who revolutionized renaissance art, was born. 

 Now, not everyone agrees with that lore. While Spain has recognized it as the birthplace of one of the giants of Spanish art and have confirmed it with a glorious plaque and a bust of the artist, others argue that no, he could not have come from such a small village, he was born and raised in the grand city of the day, Candia. And for good reason: Candia, at that time, was the capital of the eastern kingdom of the Serenissima Republica of Venetia, a great commercial center and military outpost, and was immersed in the wealth, the culture, and the opportunities of its connections with Venice, the seafaring-empire city-state that in more ways than one was controlling the sea routes of the Mediterranean Sea. 

What is beyond doubt is that Theotokopoulos studied painting and iconography at the school of Santa Katarina, a major cultural center of Candia, and that thanks to the connections between Candia and Venice, he was able to leave Crete and migrate to Italy, where he worked for years under Titian’s tutelage, before he made the great leap and move to Spain. 

This spring the city of Candia, now Irakleio, at 250,000 people the major urban center and capital of the island of Crete, organized a major music event, the “Music in the footsteps of El Greco: Crete-Venice-Toledo”. On 13 April 2022, inside the Venetian cathedral of San Marco, in the center of the Venetian town, two music ensembles, En Hordes and Ensemble Constantinople, performed an array of musical pieces using traditional Cretan and other medieval and renaissance instruments, tracing El Greco’s artistic path from post-Byzantine Crete to Renaissance Venice and from there to Spain’s Toledo. Greco’s painting evolution and revolutionary artistic expressions gave inspiration in this event for a parallel music travel that brought to life the musical environment of the times and places where El Greco lived and created. The result is an uplifting combination of Cretan traditional music, post-Byzantine chants, Italian and Spanish Renaissance songs, and contemporary compositions of members of the two ensembles specifically composed for the occasion. The resulting performance powerfully transfers the listener to the long-ago period of El Greco’s times and the use of the traditional and renaissance musical instruments conveys the tone and the cultural character of the music pieces admirably. The overall performance is a joyful experience, and I hope that you will have the chance to listen to it sometime. 

You can access the videotaped performance at: https://youtu.be/KcN7WDPQJ7Y