Music in the First Modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896: Cultural and Social Trends

Music, without any doubt, has been one of the main features during both the opening ceremony and on the concert that was given in the end of the first day in the Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens. Actually, there were two new works commissioned for performance during that first day: the Olympiakos Ymnos (Olympic Hymn) by Spyridon Samaras in a text of Kostis Palamas and Pentathlon by Dionysios Lavrangas in poetry of Ioannis Polemis. Here, we show the cultural and social trends that are implied in these two works and are characteristic of the developing ideologies in Greece of that time. Furthermore, we emphasized our scope towards the impact that these two works had on the contemporary Athenian society of that time. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]