Komitas Vardapet

Komitas in 1901/02

Soviet postage stamp from 1969 for the 100th birthday: Engl. Komitas and Rural Scene , German Komitas and rural scene

Memorial plaque on the house at Am Kupfergraben 5 in Berlin-Mitte (studies)

Soghomon Gevorki Soghomonian ( Armenian Սողոմոն Գեւորքի Սողոմոնեան ) and Komitas ( Կոմիտաս Վարդապետ , in the west-Armenian transliteration also Gomidas Vartabed called * 26 ^{. Jul} / 8. October  1869 ^greg. In Kütahya , Ottoman Empire , now Turkey , † October 22, 1935 in Paris , France ) was an Armenian priest , composer , singer , choir musician , music educator , music ethnologist, and musicologist . Today he is generally considered to be the founder of modern classical music in Armenia .

Life

Soghomon G. Soghomonian was born into a musical family. When he was six months old, his mother died; when he was eleven years old, his father also died. From then on, his grandmother looked after him until a prelate from the local Armenian diocese , who was on his way to Echmiadzin , the seat of the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church , to be ordained bishop, took him with him could enjoy further training there.

The Catholicos Gevork IV later ordered that one of the orphans should attend the church seminary and study on site. Among the 20 candidates, Soghomon was chosen because of his intelligence. There he convinced his superiors with his musical talent and his melodious voice. Finally he graduated as a monk in 1893. Thus, according to church tradition, he was considered to be newborn and was re-baptized in the name of Komitas. The name Komitas refers to a famous 7th century Catholic of the same name, who was a hymn poet and musician. Two years later he became a priest and was given the title Vardapet (or Vartabet), which actually means doctor or scholar in Armenian , but has been reserved for the priesthood for many centuries. In the meantime Mkrtitsch Chrimjan , also known under the name “Hairik” (little father), had become a Catholicos. He sponsored Komitas and gave him scholarships for studies in Tbilisi (with Makar Jekmaljan ) and Berlin, where he enrolled at Richard Schmidt's private conservatory and at the same time studied aesthetics and music theory at the Friedrich Wilhelms University . In 1899 he earned a doctorate in musicology and returned to Echmiadzin .

On “Red Sunday” , April 24, 1915, the actual beginning of the state-organized genocide against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire , he was arrested in Constantinople with several hundred other Armenian intellectuals and deported to Çankırı (east of Ankara ). While almost all of the other deportees were murdered there, Interior Minister Talaat Pasha ordered the return of eight prisoners, including Komitas. Presumably the US ambassador Henry Morgenthau and the poet Mehmet Emin Yurdakul intervened for Komitas. But on his return he found his personal work documents, including part of his valuable collection of songs, devastated. What was left was in a chaotic state.

Komitas Vardapet could no longer fully recover from the events that he had to witness. The following year, friends took him to a Turkish military hospital because of his deteriorating psychological condition. From there he was brought to Paris in 1919, where he was initially admitted to a private clinic in Ville-Evrard. From 1922 until his death in 1935 he lived completely withdrawn in the psychiatric clinic of Villejuif . A year later, his remains were brought to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.

Works

Komitas sings the "Mokats Mirza".

After his return from Berlin, Komitas took over the leadership of a male choir in Etschmiadzin in 1899 and began teaching at the seminar. At the same time he traveled across the country and collected a large number of Armenian folk songs and dances, as they were performed in the villages. He invented his own notation system with which he used these village ways, the z. T. had been handed down orally for centuries, precisely recorded. Komitas has collected around 3000 village chants (work songs, wedding songs, love songs and dances, but also songs about the painful experience of displacement, which his people repeatedly encountered). He has only published a small part of it, mostly set as an art song for piano accompaniment. The majority of the songs are arranged for polyphonic choral singing . Perhaps best known are the songs Krunk (The Crane), Tsirani Tsar (The Apricot Tree ), Antuni (Without Shelter ), Kele-kele ( Steps Up and Down ), Schogher Dschan and Kakavi Jerg (Song of the Partridge). Komitas also wrote a hymn about Armenia ( Hajastan ).

In addition to the works of secular music , the central work of the composer is the liturgy (Պատարագ, Badarak or, in Eastern Armenian, Patarak), which is still part of church music today . He began to deal with it as early as 1892; several versions have survived. Because of the First World War , his deportation and the consequences, he was unable to complete the mass. The Armenian liturgy is not strictly canonized; the forms created in the Middle Ages were recorded in a special notation, the meaning of which was later lost. This notation has not yet been finally deciphered. So Komitas relied on the way mass was sung by the oldest priests. Starting from this basis, he removed foreign (such as Arabic and Turkish) influences and enriched the musical form with elements and materials from folk music typical of Armenian music that he had collected during his travels. Today, his favorite version for three-part male choir is the best-known version of Badarak .

Through his appearances outside the church and his interest in folk music, Komitas came into conflict with the church authorities throughout his life. Therefore, in 1910, he left the Etchmiadzin Congregation for good and went to Constantinople. There Komitas founded the 300-member Gusan Choir, with which he achieved great fame and introduced many Armenians to their music for the first time.

Komitas was the first musicologist of non-European origin to be admitted to the " International Music Society ", of which he is one of the founding members. Komitas made frequent trips through all of Europe (especially Berlin and Paris he visited several times) and the Ottoman Empire, which at that time included large parts of the Middle East in addition to today's Turkey. He gave lessons, held lectures and organized highly regarded concerts with the until then largely unknown Armenian music. He was often attacked by the church authorities because of the “ profanation ” or “commercialization” of Armenian music. Public opinion among the Armenians was on his side. Today he is considered to be the last hour savior of Armenian music; without his work, the cultural heritage of western Armenia would have fallen victim to the genocide .

In the 1950s his manuscripts were also transferred from Paris to Yerevan. The first edition of Badarak was published in Paris in 1933, the first audio recording on digital medium was published in Yerevan in 1988. There is now a seven-volume edition, published in Yerevan and supervised by Robert Atajan. In July 2005, the soprano Hasmik Papian premiered nine songs based on texts by German poets, which Komitas had composed during his studies in Berlin.

Honors

Today the State Music Academy in Yerevan and a famous string quartet from Armenia are named after him.

reception

Musical theater

• 2015: Komitas by Marc Sinan , libretto by Holger Kuhla.

Movie

• 1988: Komitas ; Director : Don Askarian , actor: Samvel Ovasapian

Radio

• Deutschlandfunk , Das Feature , April 3, 2015, Daniel Guthmann: The composer and the genocide

literature

• Mesrob Krikorian: Franz Werfel and Komitas. We sat by the waters of Babylon and wept . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-34996-3 .
• Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian: Archeology of Madness. Komitas. Portrait of an Armenian Icon . Gomidas Institute, Princeton, NJ 2001, ISBN 0-9535191-7-1 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Discography

• The Voice of Komitas Vardapet (recordings from 1912). Label: Traditional Crossroads, UPC : 780702427526.
• Armand Arapian (baritone): Vincent Leterme (piano): Komitas: Armenian Songs And Dances . Label: Dinemec Classics.

Web links

Commons : Komitas Vardapet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• virtual Komitas Vardapet Museum
• Komitas biography No. 1
• Komitas biography No. 2
• Sheet music and audio files by Komitas Vardapet in the International Music Score Library Project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marc Nichanian: The national revolution (= Writers of disaster. Armenian literature in the twentieth century , Vol. 1). Gomidas Institute, Princeton 2002, ISBN 1-903656-09-5 , pp. 40-41 (Chapter: "Komitas. The Emblem and the Man").
2. ↑ Harold Hagopian: Armenia: the sorrowful sound . In: Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, Richard Trillo (eds.): World music . Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East . Rough Guides, London 1999, ISBN 1-85828-635-2 , pp. 332-337, here p. 333.
3. ↑ Helmut Mauró : How to survive a genocide. Global trauma therapy: Marc Sinan's docufictional music theater "Komitas" traces the suffering of the Armenian priest and musician of the same name and transforms the culture of remembrance into the art of remembrance . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 15, 2015, p. 13.
4. ↑ don-askarian.com: Films by Don Askarian ( Memento of the original from February 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Harvard Film Archive, hcl.harvard.edu: Hieroglyphs of Armenia: Films by Don Askarian ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ 007-berlin.de:
7. ↑ deutschlandfunk.de ; Manuscript: deutschlandfunk.de