At her age, she can no longer make big plans for the future, she said openly. Does age scare you? “I never thought about my age. Or if I did, then like other people.”
Her songs are about love, hope, sadness and happiness. Universal themes that everyone can identify with. For her, this is also one of the reasons for her success: “The music has to be connected to people, people have to hear the emotions of the songs.” Their new album also includes the new recording “Pios échi Dakria”. The song is composed in the style of Bob Dylan‘s “Blowin’ in the Wind”. A song as a source of profound comfort.
Mouskouri has often tried to say goodbye to the big stage. Over 15 years ago. As she said at the time, she felt like she was getting older. But without singing, she felt useless and empty. And so she continued singing: Music is her first love and will remain her last, as she always said.
Her new album “Happy Birthday Nana” consists of 21 songs. These include her favorite and best-known German-language songs such as “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein”, “Johnny Tambour” and “Weiße Rosen aus Athen”, with which she became famous in Austria. It is also one of three new songs recorded with the Royal Symphonic Orchestra London.
Of all places, she became a star in the German-speaking cultural area, even though she didn’t always have good memories of it. Between 1941 and 1944, Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany. The conquest of their homeland by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS was extremely bloody. And yet Mouskouri loves the country today.
A historic event from 1961, the year in which the Berlin Wall was built, contributed to this. At that time she came to Berlin to record the song “White Roses from Athens”. The record studio was in the western part of the city on Potsdamer Platz. As she exited the building, she saw people waving tissues from the other side.
“It made my heart ache and reminded me of what had happened back then,” said Mouskouri. Then she realized that people were suffering here too. The single, released in 1961, sold more than 1.5 million copies within six months. It earned the singer her first gold record.
Mouskouri was born on October 13, 1934 in Crete. Her father belonged to a resistance movement against the Nazis and was a projectionist in a cinema where her mother also worked. At the age of three she moved to Athens with her family, and at the age of six she experienced the occupation of Greece by the Germans.
Her parents had to work hard to ensure that she and her eldest sister were allowed to attend the conservatory in Athens. In 1959 she won first prize in the Greek singing competition. Her global hit “White Roses from Athens” followed two years later.
The musician was also always interested in politics. In the 1990s she was elected to the European Parliament for the conservative Greek party New Democracy. After the end of the legislative period, she gave up: “I was disappointed with politics,” as she repeatedly said. In 1993 she became a UNICEF ambassador.
In her biography “Voice of Longing: My Memories,” published in 2008, she talks about her childhood and youth, the war and the deprivation. It describes the story of a shy, complex teenager who was only excited by her passion for singing.
Music had become her accomplice, she said in one of her earlier interviews. On stage she learned to express herself through singing. Today she can boast that she belongs to the category of the most commercially successful singers of all time, having sold over 300 million records.
Her black glasses are probably the most famous in the world alongside Elton John’s. Not only did she correct her vision problems. The visual aid that has become her trademark also protected Mouskouri from her shyness. She took courage with dark glasses, as she explained earlier. She was the first major artist to appear in public wearing glasses. She was often asked to drop them off. “I never did it because I’m shortsighted, as she told the newspaper Le Parisien. The glasses never served to give her a style.
