Crossing borders within borders: extroverted musical activities of the Greek National Opera in the aftermath of the Second World War

During the immediate post-war period (Spring 1945 to Spring 1946), the newly founded Greek National Opera, under its director Theodoros N. Synadinos, developed a concert activity that was unusual for the Opera House: a series of events, focusing each time on the musical output of a specific country, where the main Allied Forces of the war (England, the U.S.A and Russia), France, a few Balkan (including Greece in a prominent showcase) but also other European countries were represented. Based mostly on documents retrieved from Th. Synadinos’s Archive and on press articles as well, the present research attempts to reconstitute, in the light of political developments, a specific part of the Athens concert life. I interpret this activity —within borders, due to the irreparable economic damage of the war— as a bridge between the dynamics of extroversion towards Europe demonstrated by Greek art music in the interwar period and the modernity trends introduced to the Athens music scene by various foreign cultural institutes in the early 1950s.