Dimitri Terzakis

Dimitri Terzakis was born in Athens on 12 March 1938. He studied composition in his home city with Yannis Papaioannou and in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmermann. In the course of his career, Terzakis became a “composer between two worlds”, developing a personal musical language rooted in the culture of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. From 1985 to 1986, he was a guest professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and was a professor at the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media in Düsseldorf in 1989. From 1990 to 1997, he directed the composition class at the HKB Bern University of the Arts. From 1994 until his retirement, Terzakis was a full professor for composition at the HMT University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki; in 2008, he received the Apollo Award from the Friends of the Greek National Opera in Athens; and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy of Athens, where he has been a corresponding member since 2015. Dimitri Terzakis lives in Leipzig and in Nafplio, Greece.