Published While Its Own Composer Could No Longer Read It

By the time Soorp Patarag reached print in Paris in 1933, Komitas Vardapet had not been able to work as a musician for well over a decade. He was arrested and deported in April 1915, in the opening roundup of the Armenian Genocide, and although he was released within months through international intervention, the trauma of what he witnessed left him unable to continue composing or performing. He was hospitalized in Paris from 1919 until his death in 1935, never recovering his working capacity across those final sixteen years of his life.

His completed arrangement of the Patarag chants reached publication anyway, prepared for the press with the support of the Komitas Committee, a body of colleagues and admirers who saw the work through to print on his behalf during the same years he could no longer see it through himself. That circumstance gives the 1933 publication date a weight beyond ordinary bibliographic fact. The book that carries Komitas's name as its arranger, and that is still sung today as one of two settings of the Armenian Divine Liturgy in active use, was finished by others acting in trust for a man who, by the time it appeared, had already lost the ability to hear it published in his own right.