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Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros (1795-1872), better known with the Italianate version of his name as Niccolò Calichiopulo Manzaro, was until recently completely unknown in Europe,1 and even in Greece his name was only connected to the setting of the Greek national anthem.2 This nationalistically motivated image of Mantzaros prevented scholars from seeing behind this simplified sense of a composer, educator and thinker. He considered music in its broader sense and developed attitudes on music which reveal major aspects regarding music in nineteenth-century Greece and Europe.Fig. 1
The only known photograph of Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros. Photographic collection of the Corfu Reading Society
Mantzaros was a noble of Corfu, which was the administrative centre of the Ionian Islands. Between 1386 and 1864 they were under continuous 'western administrations'.3 Corfu and the Ionian Islands in general remained in close contact with the European social, cultural and historical developments, especially those of the Italian peninsula. Opera (already performed in Corfu since the eighteenth century) and vocal music played central roles in the formulation of the musical life of the Ionian urban centres, which soon managed to compromise the cosmopolitan hegemony of Italian melodrama with their local (and later national) endeavours.4 Mantzaros was the earliest offspring of this creative amalgamation of Greek and broadly European musical culture.
During the mid-nineteenth century, Mantzaros had already established his fame as an important figure in Greek and Italian musical circles, especially as a contrapuntist and a 'philosopher of music'.5 However, this was the mature stage of a diverse compositional career that began in 1815. Mantzaros was born at the very end of the eighteenth century, was almost the same age as Schubert, Rossini and Donizetti, and thus belonged to that group of composers that represent the musical transition from the late eighteenth century to the multifarious nineteenth century.
In contrast to the above-mentioned composers, however, the aristocrat Mantzaros always considered himself as a dilettante, an attitude that allowed him a privileged relationship with the art and the science of sounds. This also gave him the opportunity to develop a personal approach to music of its time, combining the experiences of the past with the demands and the diverse attitudes of the nineteenth century. At the same time,...