In Memory of Vangelis: A Genius of Our Time

Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou known professionally as Vangelis, was a Greek musician, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score for Chariots of Fire (1981), as well as for composing scores for the films Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Alexander (2004), and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan. Vangelis began his career working with several pop bands of the 1960s such as The Forminx and Aphrodite’s Child, with the latter’s album 666 (1972) going on to be recognized as a progressive-psychedelic rock classic. Throughout the 1970s, Vangelis composed scores for several animal documentaries, including L’Apocalypse des Animaux, La Fête sauvage, and Opéra sauvage; the success of these scores brought him into the film scoring