Obituary: Mikis Theodorakis wrote the theme tune of “Zorba the Greek”

IT IS QUITE possibly the most famous two-note phrase in post-war European music: a stepwise trip up the scale that sounds like a question. Repeated over and over, it invites you to stretch your arms out wide, lift your chin and start clicking your fingers. The first time you hear the opening notes of the theme tune to “Zorba the Greek”, which was composed in a single late-night jamming session in 1964, Anthony Quinn is telling Alan Bates about his santuri, the instrument he cares for like a child. “It makes the best music. It goes with me always.” From then on, at every dramatic turn, you hear a little bit more of Zorba’s theme, until the moment on the beach when the tune swells into an ode on Grecian virility and romantic spirit as the two men leap into the rhythmic, slow-fast, sirtaki dance that cements their friendship.

Five years after “Zorba”, the composer is living in internal exile in his homeland. His music has been banned, for arousing passions and causing strife among the people, it is said. A young woman is put on trial for playing one of his records and turning up the volume as high as it would go. The Greek colonels who had seized power in 1967 judged his compositions to be in the service of communism. His two small children are forbidden from playing with the other kids at...