Contemporaries about Komitas

Komitas Vardaped was bold enough to conduct the choir and sing his own melodies, in Stabat Mater he reached to such emotional peak which almost entailed to tears and for which the audience gave ovation. Nothing was more heart touching than watching his modest and majesty bow to the audience applause, under the black high cowl of the monk.

With in-depth penetration you presented us the eminent efficacy of the high and developed civilization entirely far from us, – surprisingly erudite presentation of everything that bears authentically exceptional significance for acknowledgement of the Western Ancient civilization, your perfect art of lecturing and singing – these are phenomena that could astonish us, and they stay alive in the memory of your audience.

Your erudite and profound lectures helped us look deep into music that was obscure to us hitherto; music that could enlighten us – the Western civilization. You would provide inestimable service to modern science, if you publish your compositions; and I will be extremely happy, if I may support you in it.

Was he ideally a worker, ethnographer, scholar, or a composer? Even though Komitas appeared in the music world as an author of the Armenian songs’ arrangements, I persist that first of all he was a composer. His method was the only right way for a person to choose, who had an enormous zeal to reveal the harmonic and polyphonic style that were appropriate with their nature to the authentic Armenian folk song.