Nikos Skalkottas
Greek composer and violinist (1904–1949)
Nikos Skalkottas (Greek: Νίκος Σκαλκώτας; 21 March 1904 – 19 September 1949) was a Greek composer of 20th-century classical music. A member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition. He also produced a sizeable amount of tonal music in the last phase of his musical creativity.
Biography
Skalkottas was born in Chalcis on the island of Euboea. He started violin lessons with his father and uncle Kostas Skalkottas at the age of five, three years after his family moved to Athens because Kostas had lost the post of town bandmaster in 1906 due to political and legal intrigues (Thornley 2001). He continued studying violin with Tony Schultze at the Athens Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1920 with a diploma of high distinction. The following year a scholarship from the Averoff Foundation enabled him to study abroad. From 1921 to 1933 he lived in Berlin, where he first took violin lessons at the Prussian Academy of Arts with Willy Hess (Thornley 2001). Deciding in 1923 to give up his career as a violinist and become a composer, he studied composition with Robert Kahn, Paul Juon, Kurt Weill and Philipp Jarnach. Between 1927 and 1932 he was a member of Arnold Schoenberg's Masterclass in Composition at the Academy of Arts (Thornley 2001), where his fellow pupils included Marc Blitzstein, Roberto Gerhard, Norbert von Hannenheim, Natalia Pravosudovich and Peter Schacht.
“Nikos Skalkottas” enters the record as greek composer and violinist (1904–1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nikos, Skalkottas and Greek can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q452352. VIAF identifies the subject as 24796181. The Library of Congress control number is n83176163. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1949, 1906 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nikos Skalkottas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.