Greek Composer And Politician Mikis Theodorakis Has Died At The Age Of 96

Greek composer and politician Mikis Theodorakis died Thursday at age 96. A notice on his website cited cardiopulmonary arrest as the cause of death. Theodorakis' music for the film Zorba the Greek became a worldwide shorthand for a seize-the-moment kind of joyfulness.

However, Theodorakis endured a lot of tragedy — and he was a much more complicated person than Zorba the Greek and its most famous song, a carefree dance, would suggest.

Theodorakis was imprisoned, tortured and exiled multiple times: the first time during World War II, as a resistance fighter; again during the brutal Greek civil war of the 1950s; and then again in the 1960s, when he was already internationally famous — by a military junta which banned his music.

His leftist politics and his music went hand-in-hand, as he told NPR's Morning Edition in 1994. "I wanted to unite the popular and the serious," he explained, "and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio. I put one, one question: for whom I compose. My answer is I wanted to address to all my people, and if I write music for the Greek people ... I compose for all the people. I write for all the peoples, for all the world."