September 20, 2022 4:08 pm
Much has rightly been written about Irene Papas, a Greek actress and singer who died at the age of 96 on September 14. Her work with directors such as Elio Petri, Costa-Gavras and Francesco Rosi was remembered; we talked about her about her Penelope on television about her who made her very popular in Italy at the end of the sixties, and about her Hollywood friendships with Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando. It has also been written of her beauty that she went through intact the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. An ancient beauty, many say. Yet, reviewing the photos and films today, and listening to her voice in interviews and records, we discover that the beauty of Irene Papas was very modern. It is the beauty of a woman who has gone through the twentieth century experiencing all the contradictions and demands of liberation and who has embodied the aesthetic ideals of different eras, from the glamor of the fifties to neorealism, and who has given a face to the deepest essence of his country: Greece.
Papas is very modern when, in 1980, she talks about her work as an actress and how she tried, for example, to give Cleopatra back to her figure as a powerful and intelligent woman and to take off that nineteenth-century image “of a secretary a bit ‘ flirtatious trying to win over the boss ”. And she is modern when, in the late 1970s, she records the song ∞ (Infinity) with the Greek progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child founded in 1967 by Vangelis and Demis Roussos. The piece is part of 666, an ambitious and cumbersome biblical-themed concept album released in 1972 and which sees Irene Papas improvise on a text that says: “I was, I am, I am to come” (“I was, I am and I am about to come “). Papas transforms this verse inspired byApocalypse (“I am he who is, who was and who will come”) in an orgasmic crescendo that, between panting and screaming, should, according to Vangelis, evoke “the pain of childbirth and the pleasure of mating”.
∞ (Infinity) when it comes out it causes scandal and still impresses today, especially because it seems to float in a gray area between I love you…me neither by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg and the excruciating vocal experiments of another great Greek interpreter: Diamanda Galás. A curiosity: some of those pants were sampled, in 1990, by Michael Cretu in Principles of lustfor his Enigma project, which mixed Gregorian chants and ambient pop in a vaguely kitschy way.
After the release of 666 Aphrodite’s Child disbanded but Irene Papas remained in contact with Vangelis, who in those years embarked on a career as an electronic experimenter and composer of soundtracks. It is 1979 when Papas and Vangelis meet at Nemo Studios, a recording studio that the Greek musician had created in the heart of London in 1975 equipped with synthesizers, keyboards, sequencer e drum machine last generation. Vangelis will use Nemo Studios until 1987 and here will compose soundtracks as memorable as those of Blade runner by Ridley Scott e Moments of glory by Hugh Hudson, with whom he will also win an Oscar.
Papas and Vangelis begin to select the pieces of Odes, an album of Greek folk songs backed up by dense electronic arrangements. Ample space is given to the magnificent voice of Irene Papas who often sings a cappella and, as an actress as she is, she manages to give urgency and breath to her lyrics, all sung in Greek. Often Odes an album is defined new age, an umbrella term so broad that it means nothing. This collaboration is fascinating because it straddles two eras and two different sensibilities. On the one hand it is rooted in the seventies, in progressive rock and folk-prog, on the other it is a pioneering electronic music album already projected in the eighties with an aesthetic that today we would define ambient-folk or, for the more imaginative, folktronics.
The album opens with a march, The forty brave, a song that recalls the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Forty valiant men set out for Tripoli, in the Peloponnese, and their advance is accompanied by the thundering voice of Irene Papas who alternates with a five-voice male choir. The piece is accompanied by a video in which we see Papas striding along the crowded streets of today’s Athens. Vangelis’ arrangement is solemn, with military parade percussion and the tolling of bells. The small orange tree instead it is an intimate song, a reflection in a few lines on the beauty that fades and on the unstoppable cycle of the seasons. With the Fire dancean instrumental piece, you enter more properly in the prog field: an ambitious composition divided into various movements, punctuated by rapid keyboard solos.
The most beautiful song arrives in the second side: even if we listen in streaming we try to keep an idea of the album, since the sequence of the pieces of works like this one is carefully chosen also based on the gesture that is made when shooting an lp and you put it back on the turntable. Am sorry is a traditional Greek song, the reworking of an ancient genre of sung poetry, the funeral lament, which dates back to preomeric times. Listening Am sorry the pages of the British traveler and Hellenist Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in his book, come to mind Mani, travel to the Peloponnesedescribes in detail the mirage, the funeral ode improvised by mourning women in southern Greece. Talk about the word, the tears of all the women that are then distilled into the ode of a single woman, the lamenter, who begins to declaim improvised verses divided into preface, exposition and epilogue. The poet pulls her hair, scratches her face while she, in a semi-ecstatic state, describes the deeds of the deceased and calls him with epithets that seem to come out of theIliad or from Trojan women. It is a tradition that, at the time of Fermor, had survived only in Mani, in the extreme south of the Peloponnese, and perhaps, given the isolation of that region which remained Greek even during the Ottoman occupation, it is the most evident folkloric legacy of the Ancient Greece.
The lament that Papas and Vangelis decide to include in this record is not the ode to a hero or a brave man. It is a private pain, a mother’s farewell song to a dead child. In this song there are no quick-footed heroes compared to eagles or lions, or brave fighters, perhaps fallen into some family feud. There is a decorated boat that is pushed into the sea and it is she who speaks, inhabited by the soul of the infant who leaves the earth: “Don’t cover me with the sky, don’t crush me on the ground because I have not yet enjoyed my youth … which mother loses a child and does not melt in pain? “. Papas uses her voice according to the tradition of sacred songs of the Byzantine church: her vocal technique here is very close to that of Sister Marie Keyrouz, a Lebanese Maronite nun among the greatest modern interpreters of oriental liturgical music. Vangelis accompanies the litany with a long instrumental introduction and a highly reverberated electronic arrangement that recalls certain plucked string instruments of the Hellenic tradition.
This album that mixes ancient and modern, folklore and technology, the seventies and eighties, is perhaps the most effective way to remember the charisma of the singer Irene Papas. With Vangelis the collaboration continued in 1986 with Rapsodiesan album more openly inspired by Byzantine songs, but Odes remains their most interesting and surprising work. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods occasionally descended from Olympus and mingled, unseen, with mortals. Reviewing the video of Forty brave we cannot help but think that Irene Papas is still walking among us, in her fluttering yellow dress, in the convulsive and busy streets of Athens where it is enough to look up to feel overwhelmed by the shadow of the Acropolis.
Irene Popes
Odes
Polydor, 1979