140th birth anniversary of Komitas marked in Berlin

PanARMENIAN.Net -
The140th birth anniversary of Komitas was marked in Kaiser-Wilhelm Church in Berlin last week. The event started with a service offered by Archimandrite Eghishe, the spiritual leader of the Armenian community of Berlin.



“Such events are important for preservation of national identity. They help the young generation know their culture,” chairman of the Armenian church and cultural community of Berlin Petros Tikichian said in his opening remarks.



Community member Sona Aiber-Chukaszyan gave a report on Komitas’ life.



“It was a great evening, filled with the energy and spirit of Komitas,” Father Eghishe told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter.



The event was attended by art workers, historians, students and representatives of the Armenian community of Berlin.

Komitas, (Soghomon Soghomonyan) was born on September 26, 1869 in Anatolia, Turkey, in the town of Koutina (Ketaia). His father, Gevorg Soghomonyan was a shoemaker but he also composed songs and had a beautiful voice. The composer’s mother – Tagui - was also singled out for her vivid musical abilities; she was a carpet weaver. His mother died when he was one, and ten years later his father also died. 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 entered the seminary (where he impressed the catholicos with his singing talent) and finished it in 1893 when he became a monk. According to church tradition, newly ordained priests are given new names, and Soghomon was renamed Komitas (named after a 7th century Armenian catholicos who was also a hymn writer). Two years later he became a priest and obtained the title Vardapet, meaning a priest or a church scholar.



He established and conducted the monastery choir till 1896 when he went to Berlin, enrolled 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.



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, said to be the day when the Armenian Genocide officially began, he was arrested and put to train the next day together with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Cankırı in northern Central Anatolia, at a distance of some 300 miles. His good friend, Turkish nationalist poet Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, the authoress Halide Edip, and the U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau intervened with the government and, by special orders fromTalat Pasha, Komitas was dispatched back to the capital alongside eight other Armenians who had been deported. Armenian sources deny rumors of earlier schizophrenia or venereal disease and stress that he never fully recovered from these 15 days experience. As of autumn 1916, he was taken to a Turkish military hospital and he moved to Paris in 1919 where he died in a psychiatric clinic Villejuif in 1935. Next year his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.



The Armenian community of Germany was founded by Armenian students, who arrived in Leipzig in 1885 and formed a Union there. However, like much of the Armenian Diaspora, most Armenians immigrated to Germany after the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. Others came later, fleeing conflicts in Iran, Azerbaijan and Lebanon. Another influx was caused by nationalist persecution in Turkey.



The first Armenian organization was the Armenian Colony of Berlin, established in 1923. By 1975, Armenian associations would be established in Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. In the 1980s, other associations were established in Bremen, Braunschweig, Bielefeld, Duisburg, Neuwied, Bonn, Hanau, Eppingen, Nuernberg, Kehl and elsewhere.



Presently, 40-42 thousands of Armenians are reported to live in Germany.