Biography
Solomon Soghomonyan, known as Komitas ( 1869 - 1935) was an Armenian composer, singer, musicologist, who is considered the founder of the National School of Music of Armenia and is recognized as one of the first of ethnomusicology.Komitas was born on October 8, 1869 in Kütahya in western Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, to Armenian parents. His mother was only 16 years old when she gave birth to him and she died after 6 months. The fact that he grew up without a mother left deep scars on him, his first poems were dedicated to the mother he had not met. He was raised by his grandmother and in 1880, four years after finishing primary school in Kütahya, he was sent by his father to Bursa to continue his education. He stayed there only 4 months, as his father died and he had to return to his hometown. He was sent to a religious center of Armenia, where he was trained and ordained a priest. In 1895 he managed to go to Berlin and study music at the University of Frederick William. When he returned, he collected and recorded more than 3,000 Armenian folk songs, of which more than half have been lost. He was also interested in other cultures and in 1903 published the first collection of Kurdish folk songs entitled Kurdish Melodies. His choir sang Armenian songs in several European cities. In 1910 he moved to Istanbul to escape the mistreatment of ultra-conservative clergy, where he continued to compose and promote Armenian folk music.
In 1915 the Ottoman authorities began the extermination of the Armenian people, one of their actions was to arrest all intellectuals in order to destroy the core of Armenian culture. Hundreds were transported to the depths of Anatolia, most of them were killed, but Komitas, after the intervention of some famous poets, was released and returned to Istanbul, having developed though a serious mental disorder. He was initially placed in a hospital where he remained until 1919 and then transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life without regaining his sanity. He died on October 22, 1935.