Part 2
Symphony in one movement
(The return of Ulysses)
Skalkottas first performance
Anthony Friese-Greene writes: This is a late work composed in 1944-45. Although he originally intended it as a vast overture to a proposed opera on events following Ulysses' arrival at the Island of the Phaeacians, Skalkottas, a few months before his death in 1949, by now in despair for the libretto which had long been promised, wrote that the overture could be played as an independent symphonic work. John Papaioannou , the Greek authority on Skalkottas, told me in Athens last year that this masterpiece was supposed to portray Ulysses' discovery of a new, unknown land, seen at dawn: the hopes kindled in his imagination; the adventures remembered in all their vividness.