The composer of ‘Zorba’s tune’, the distinctive folk dance-based theme for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, has died in Athens at the age of 96. The Greek prime minister has since announced three days of national mourning, while the country’s culture minister paid tribute to ‘our Mikis, the teacher, the intellectual, the radical’.

Born into a Cretan family on the island of Chios, Theodorakis learnt Greek folk music and Byzantine liturgical chants from his mother. After studying music, first in Athens and then in Paris, he returned to Greece in 1960. He subsequently set Yiannis Ritsos’s poem Epitaphios, transforming Greek popular music by marrying the words of one of Greece’s leading poets with rhythms and modes from the low-class rebetika music. Eventually, he added elements of classical symphonic music to his compositions, and also founded the Little Symphony Orchestra of Athens. In 1964, he composed the music that accompanied Anthony Quinn’s barefoot dance on a Cretan beach, now enshrined as the ‘Zorba dance’ and re-enacted by Greeks and tourists alike in tavernas around the world.

For Theodorakis, political activism and composition went hand in hand. As he told the New York Times, ‘Always I have lived with two sounds, one political, one musical’. He joined the resistance against German and Italian occupation of Greece when he was just 17, which led to arrest and torture. By now, he had read the works of Marx and Lenin and when his family moved to Athens in 1943 he joined the Greek Communist Party. During the Civil War following World War Two, he was arrested and eventually exiled on the island of Makronissos where, despite barely escaping with his life, he began composing his first symphony. In 1964 he was elected to the Greek parliament as a supporter of the United Democratic Left party and subsequently spearheaded a campaign to restore democracy. During the military junta from 1967-74, Theodorakis was again imprisoned; this time he composed March of the Spirit, a setting of a poem by Angelos Sikelianos. He conducted the LSO in a performance of it in 1970, three months after being banished from his homeland. ‘It was as if Benjamin Britten had set verses by Auden to be sung by the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ exclaimed one critic. He continued to write anthems of resistance and songs of protest, not just in support of Greek’s lost liberty but in honour of the oppressed people of all nations. His Mauthausen Trilogy (1965) – an oratorio based on poems written by the Greek author Iakovos Kambanellis, who was imprisoned by the Nazis during the Holocaust – is widely regarded as one of his finest works.

During the 1980s he focused on symphonies, choral and chamber works, as well as scores for theatre and cinema and song cycles. By the 1990s he had turned to opera, composing a trilogy based on ancient Greek tragedy: Medea (1991), Electra (1995) and Antigone (1999). He withdrew from official government activities in 1993 and became musical director of the Greek state broadcaster’s choir and orchestra, but remained politically active until the end, attending an anti-austerity protest as recently as 2012 and getting teargassed in the process.

In September 2005, Gramophone's Ivan Moody paid tribute to Theodorakis’s 80th birthday with an assessment of his recorded legacy. He singled out the composer’s own performance from 1995 of his ‘tragic, epic’ First Symphony on the Intuition label – ‘an impassioned reading inevitably, powerfully imbued with an autobiographical quality’. But perhaps the most significant recording was ‘Resistance’, again on Intuition – a series of resistance songs smuggled out of the country after Theodorakis recorded them while in hiding in 1967, creating polyphony by overdubbing them several times with two tape recorders and beating rhythms with a ruler on a table. ‘In a sense, it is the essence of Theodorakis,’ wrote Moody. ‘Haunting and hunted, stripped of everything except human dignity.’