The great Komitas, the founder of the Armenian national composition school made a contribution to the culture of his nation that cannot be overestimated. His whole life was devoted to study, revival and arrangement of pieces of Armenian popular music art thus laying a foundation for the national professional music. He was not just a composer but a music historian and theoretician, student of folklore, singer, choir leader, teacher and public figure. He proved to be a true innovator in all these areas.
The great musician's tragic fate was the reason why his artistic legacy was scattered all over the world, while its major part was irretrievably lost.
Komitas was the first to study Armenian folk and sacred music. His research work started a new era of Armenian theoretical thought and music history. Combining the advanced experience of the world music art with the authenticity, figurative substance and expressive means of the Armenian national arts, he introduced Armenian national music into the stream of all-European development and made a valuable contribution to the world's study of music folklore. His polyphonic work became the most important means of development and enrichment of popular one-voice material (Armenian monodies).
Komitas was not only an arranger of folk music. He promoted it actively and consistently in his articles and studies standing up for its independence and originality. His famous words "The people are the only creator, go and learn from them" has been a guiding start for many generations of Armenian composers.
Komitas (Soghomon Gevorki Soghomonyan) was born in 1869 in Kutina, Turkey, into a family of an artisan. The future composer's parents were great lovers of music. They said that the local folks liked to sing the songs composed by his mother very much. In 1881, Soghomon moved to Echmiadzin to study in a seminary there. His wonderful voice and outstanding music abilities singled him out among the pupils and drew the attention of his teachers. In the seminary, he not only got general education, but also showed a great interest in studying Armenian national music collecting examples of village folklore from various parts of Armenia and learning church canticles. At that time he did his first research works on Armenian church music.
On graduation from the seminary in 1893, Soghomon was ordained and stayed in the seminary as choir leader. In 1895, he took orders of archimandrite and was renamed Komitas after Catholicos Komitas, who was also a prominent poet of the 7th century and an author of sharakans (church hymns). His desire to continue his studies soon led him to Tiflis where he was taught by a well-known Armenian composer Makar Yekmalian.
In 1896, Komitas arrived in Berlin to study at the private conservatory of Richard Schmidt. There he studied theory and composition, mastered the piano and organ, and took private singing lessons. As if that wasn't enough, Komitas attended lectures at philosophy department of the Berlin University, studied issues of aesthetics, universal history and music history.
In 1899, Komitas returned to Echmiadzin. His most intensive and fruitful period began. He worked on composition, collected and published books of folk songs, organized choral concerts, spoke in the press, and changed the entire system of music teaching in the seminary. He was seriously involved in research activities too, working on deciphering of the Armenian khazy, i.e. old characters of Armenian musical notation.
In 1901, Komitas participated in the work of the International Music Congress in Berlin. In 1906, he went to Paris to perform concerts and lecture on Armenian music.
In 1907, Komitas returned to Echmiadzin again and stayed there for three years without quitting the place. However, the clergy attempted to restrict his activities by all means, and in 1910 the composer had to leave Echmiadzin for Constantinople where he hoped to realize his cherished dream to establish the first Armenian conservatory. In Constantinople, he expanded his concert and journalistic activities organizing choirs and performing with them in Turkey and Egypt. In 1913, Komitas went to Berlin to lecture. In 1914, during the congress of the International Music Society, he made two reports on Armenian folk church music – "Armenian Folk Music" and "On Old and New Musical Notation of Armenian Sacred Music."
Komitas's greatest work Patarag performed by a men's choir premiered on 17 and 18 April, 1915, in an Armenian church of Constantinople's Galatia quarters. The next performance of the composition was scheduled for 2 May of the same year. However, that was never destined to happen.
In 1915, the authorities of the Sultan's Turkey inflicted cruel reprisals against the population of West Armenia. Komitas was a witness of the monstrous atrocities of the Sultan's hirelings, and on 24 April he was arrested himself and was subject to torture and imprisonment, and then sent with a large group of Armenian notables to the city of Çankırı. Although the composer was dispatched back to Constantinople thanks to the help of his influential friends, the emotional upset he had gone through was an alleged cause a severe mental illness that he never recovered from.
Komitas died in 1935 in one of the Parisian clinics at the age of 66. In 1936, his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.
The name of Komitas became a symbol of selfless service to homeland, people and arts. "He must live for the Armenian people, and the people must live for him, from now on," said Catholicos of All Armenians Vazghen I.
Patarag (Liturgy) is the peak of Komitas's artistic life, the greatest achievement of polyphonic arrangement of Armenian sacred music. The creation of Patarag was preceded with a huge body of work done by Komitas in terms of collecting, studying and selecting melodies. Komitas craved for writing a national liturgy. Arranging the church melodies, he wanted to restore their originality uniqueness and simplicity, to free them from all those extraneous features that emerged through the centuries, and to make the structure of the melodies more specific whenever it was possible.
This is why Komitas turned to village priests who performed those melodies as it was traditionally meant. Owing to his fluent use of polyphonic principles, his knowledge of the choral art techniques, and his ability to reproduce so truthfully and expressively the national character of Armenian church music through polyphony, Komitas created a piece of the highest value.
