Vangelis

Evangelos Papathanassiou was born on 29 March 1943 in Agria, a seaside village near Volos, and grew up in Athens. He began picking out tunes on the piano at four and gave his first public performance at six, but he refused formal lessons and never properly learned to read or write musical notation; all his life he composed by playing and recording. In 1963 he founded The Forminx, one of the first Greek rock-and-roll groups, which had a string of hits in Athens before breaking up in 1966.

In 1968, in the first months of the military dictatorship, he left Greece for Paris with the singer Demis Roussos and the drummer Loukas Sideras. There they formed Aphrodite's Child, whose single «Rain and Tears», built on a baroque chord sequence, became a hit across Europe in the summer of 1968. The band's double album 666 (1972), a wild setting of the Book of Revelation, was its last. Vangelis stayed in Paris, writing music for the nature documentaries of Frédéric Rossif, and in 1974 moved to London, where he built Nemo Studios near Marble Arch and recorded the albums that made his reputation as a solo electronic composer.

From the 1980s he lived between London, Paris and Athens, avoided interviews and concerts, and worked mostly alone at night among his keyboards. Greece honoured him repeatedly in his later years, and a 2001 concert at the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens was broadcast worldwide. He died in Paris on 17 May 2022, aged 79.

Vangelis' instrument was the synthesizer, and his achievement was to make electronic music sound warm, grand and human. The albums Heaven and Hell (1975), Albedo 0.39 (1976), Spiral (1977) and China (1979) established his style, layered chords, long melodies and the sound of space, and his collaborations with Jon Anderson of Yes produced pop hits such as «I'll Find My Way Home».

The cinema made him famous. For Chariots of Fire (1981), the British film about two runners at the 1924 Olympics, he wrote a theme on electric piano and synthesizers that reached number one in the United States and won the Academy Award for best original score; it has been played at every Olympic Games and every slow-motion race since. Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott's science-fiction film, is remembered as much for its rain-soaked synthesizer score as for its images, and for the same director he wrote 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), whose chorus-like title theme became an anthem at sporting events across Europe. Later came the Antarctic documentary Antarctica (1983), Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004), and the choral work Mythodea, performed in Athens in 2001 and adopted by NASA as the music of its Mars Odyssey mission. In 2016 he released Rosetta, for the European Space Agency's comet probe, and his last album, Juno to Jupiter (2021), was again a tribute to a spacecraft. Space, antiquity and the sea were the three themes he returned to for half a century.

Vangelis is the Greek composer the whole world has heard without knowing it. The Chariots of Fire theme is the sound of every finish line, and Greek television uses the 1492 theme for anything heroic. In Greece he is remembered with pride as the boy from Volos who conquered Hollywood without ever learning to read music: his hometown Agria and the city of Volos celebrate him, the Forminx and Aphrodite's Child records are played on Greek radio, and «Rain and Tears» is a standard at Greek parties. The 2001 Mythodea concert at the temple of Olympian Zeus, with the Acropolis in the background, remains one of the great images of Athens in music. A learner can start with Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner and the album China, and then discover the early Greek songs of The Forminx.

• He never learned to read or write musical notation and composed everything by ear, recording as he played.
• «Rain and Tears» (1968) by Aphrodite's Child is built on the chord sequence of Pachelbel's Canon.
• NASA chose his choral work Mythodea as the official music of the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission, and the European Space Agency later commissioned Rosetta for its comet probe.
• The Chariots of Fire theme, written for a film about the 1924 Olympics, was performed at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012.