Vangelis – Mythodea: Movement 9
2001
6.2K Likes
Best comments
1.“NASA transmitted this in SPACE!!!”
More comments
- 2.“The lyrics aren't random, my friend. If you look into it, they're an invocation to Ares not to let what fate decrees happen – the destruction of humanity.”Translated from Greek
- 3.“Makes you cry... because it lets you know what's coming for humanity. There's no turning back when God has had enough of humans' bullshit...”
The story
Vangelis said the first version of Mythodea took him about an hour to write. It premiered in 1993 at the Herodes Atticus Theater in Athens as a charity concert: seven movements for orchestra, choir and synths, with words he wrote himself in Ancient Greek. Then it waited eight years for a reason to come back.
The reason was Mars. Sony Classical set up a tie-in with NASA, and Mythodea became the official music of the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission, with the album's release timed to the spacecraft slipping into Mars orbit. Vangelis stretched it to ten movements and staged it at the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens with the London Metropolitan Orchestra, the Greek National Opera Chorus and two of the biggest sopranos alive, Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman. Blake Neely conducted.
This fan upload of Movement 9 puts an English translation of the Greek in front of you, so you can follow the choir as it begs the gods to hold off fate. The god of war turns up by his Greek name, Ares, which the Romans called Mars. For a Mars mission soundtrack, that's a nice wink. The album went number one and platinum in Greece and climbed to number four on Billboard's Top Classical Albums. Not bad for an hour's work.
