Thirty years after the death of Manos Hadjidakis (1925-1994) and some forty years from the time when he delivered his comments on the ground-breaking Third Program under his direction, we have the opportunity to read again or read now (depending on age and generation) his radio speech captured in a book entitled “The comments of the Third”, which has just been released by Ikaros publications. These are the comments that Hadjidakis read from the Third Program every Sunday at noon between May 1978 and April 1980 and which were first published in 1980 by Exantas publications edited by Giorgos Chronas.
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Most important in the book is Hadjidaki’s orality – he may have delivered the comments based on typescripts corrected at the last minute by hand but his speech had the liveliness, immediacy and graceful (why not elegant) instability of spoken conversation, the close, friendly contact and the almost confessional conversation. Thus Hadzidakis will cover with his playful (never really offensive) style, as well as with his unexpected and usually unconventional views, critical issues of culture and cultural production during the first post-political years – always through an expanded, open and democratic political outlook. Hadjidaki did not like party conflicts and factional quarrels, he was constantly suspicious of state intentions, abhorred blabbering public commitments and was ready at any time to dismiss any bureaucratic sleight of hand or even mess with the management of the then only state television – even if directing the Third Program he had to face multiple, intense and from various directions criticism.
Starting from his own temple, the world of music, Hadzidakis will directly state that the history of music in Greece is for crying, whether we think of the marches and the conservatories or any public event: they are all sad because with the seriousness and their capital omissions ignore both classical music and popular creation, deeply rooted in Greek culture. Hadjidakis felt, let’s face it, very hesitant about the tradition – it bothered him because it was imperatively associated with dubious, at least rhetorical and hollow proclamations’ because under its respectable clothes ignorance and backwardness were hidden’ because it itself became a source of inhibition of the organized research into the truly forgotten values not only of the distant past, but also of the immediate present. Values that persistently ask for their revitalization, restart and solid enrichment.
In this way, everything (party blinders, lame culture and inert everyday political life) ends up in an immense, as Hadzidakis calls it, the Poultry, in a carnival celebration, in a festival in a vacuum, which forbids us to acquire – and to conquer- its exact opposite: a “Poultry with hens that are tasty and not sensitive”. If indeed the possibility existed, then citizens and artists alike could claim a freedom that would love the native place with eyes fixed at the same time on alien spheres – on twin threads beyond borders.
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Hadjidaki’s writing is playful but far from simple and even less simplistic. His phrase is densely reinforced on the one hand by puns and associative explosions with an expressionist color and on the other hand, by a deliberately broken chain of judgments that are as if projected on a screen with a Fellini film or as if they were an extension of the surrealist poetry of Empirikos, Engonopoulos, Elytis and Miltos Shaktouris. Poets who suddenly come to meet Solomon, Francois Villon, Goethe and Eliot.
The “Comments of the Third” primarily reveal the poetic temperament of Hadjidakis, his sworn belief in heavens and anthons according to the Elytian model, in heavenly birds capable of bringing the universe up and down, resisting ugliness and praising, even ” to the ears of those who do not hear”, beauty and joy.
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Source: www.zougla.gr
