Wild freedom
Johann Sebastian Bach began his early musical education at the age of 9. Ludwig van Beethoven played his first public concert at the age of 7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is said to have written his first compositions at the age of 5. But for Vangelis, who was born as Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in 1943 and died this May as a result of Covid disease, even that was too late. „In my case, my key experience was my first cry after birth, because it almost seems like shortly after that I was already focused on music,“ he once stated. [1] Given his increasing reclusiveness, music indeed became his almost exclusive mouth-piece - and the vehicle for a catalog that was at once wondrous and recognizable, futuristic-forward-looking and traditional, artful, commercial and maximally independent.
