Soghomon Soghomonyan (Komitas)

Soghomon (Gevorgi) Soghomonyan was born in Turkey. Every member of his family were found of music.His mother died when he was one, and his father died ten years later. His grandmother looked after him until 1881, when a prelate of the local Armenian diocese went to Echmiadzin to be consecrated a bishop. The catholicos Gevork IV ordered him to bring one orphaned child to be educated at the Echmiadzin Seminary. Soghomon was chosen among 20 candidates and admitted into the seminary (where he impressed the catholicos with his singing talent) and graduated in 1893, after which he became a monk. According to church tradition, newly ordained priests are given new names, and Soghomon was renamed Komitas (named after the seventh-century Armenian catholicos who was also a hymn writer). Two years later, he became a priest and obtained the title Vardapet (or Vartabed), meaning a “priest” or a “church scholar.”

He established and conducted the monastery choir until 1896, when he went to Berlin, enrolled in the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm University and studied music at the private conservatory of Prof. Richard Schmidt. In 1899, he acquired the title Doctor of Musicology and returned to Echmiadzin, where he took over conducting a polyphonic male choir. He traveled extensively around the country, listening to and recording details about Armenian folk songs and dances performed in various villages. This way, he collected and published some 3000 songs, many of them adapted to choir singing.

His major work is Badarak (Divine Liturgy), still used today as one of the two most popular musical settings of the Armenian Church liturgy or mass. Today the best-known version of Badarak is his favourite for a four-voiced male choir. The words certainly are not original but are the text of the Armenian mass, which has been used for centuries. Armenian Church music was traditionally monophonic, but Makar Yekmalian, Komitas, and several other musician/composers in the 19th and 20th centuries arranged polyphonic versions of the pre-existing melodies. Some composers (but not Komitas or Yekmalian) created completely original musical settings of the liturgy as well.

He was the first non-European to be admitted into the International Music Society, of which he was a co-founder. He gave many lectures and performances throughout Europe, Turkey and Egypt, thus presenting till then very little known Armenian music.

From 1910, he lived and worked in Istanbul. There, he established a 300-member choir, Gusan. On April 24, 1915, the day when the Armenian Genocide officially began, he was arrested and put on a train. The next day together with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Çankırı in northern Central Anatolia. By special orders from Taliat Pasha, Komitas was dispatched (ուղարկվեց ) back to the capital alongside eight other Armenians who had been deported during which Komitas suffered tremendously and was afflicted with traumatic neurosis.

In the autumn of 1916, he was taken to a hospital in Constantinople, Hôspital de la paix, and then moved to Paris in 1919, where he died in a psychiatric clinic in Villejuif in 1935. Next year, his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon that was named after him.

The Yerevan State Musical Conservatory is named after Komitas. There also exists a worldwide renowned string quartet named after Komitas.

The following landmarks were named after him:

The central square of Ejmiatsin city is named after Komitas.  Yerevan State Musical Conservatory is named after Komitas Vardapet

Yerevan State Musical Conservatory is named after Komitas Vardapet.

Komitas Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Yerevan’s Arabkir District, is named after Komitas Vardapet.

The writers’ and poets’ pantheon in Yerevan is named after Komitas.