Armenag Shah-Mouradian: Beyond The Protege Of Gomidas

Written by Harry Kezelian

Armenag Shah-Mouradian is one of the all-time exemplars of Armenian music. Commonly recognized as “the protege of Gomidas Vartabed,” he himself had a huge impact on Armenian music aside from interpreting the works of his famous teacher.

Shah-Mouradian was born in 1878 in the city of Moush, in the heart of Ottoman-ruled Western Armenia. His father, Sarkis Shah-Mouradian, was known as “Tarpin Srko” (Sarkis the Blacksmith). Srko was a gregarious figure and music lover whose door was always open, and was well-liked by the local Armenians, Kurds, and Turks. An amateur player of the boulghari, a small type of saz (long-necked Anatolian lute), Srko knew how to sing ashough (minstrel) songs by heart and local musicians who played the zourna, dap, and damboura (a larger type of saz) often visited the family. 

Noticing young Armenag’s inclination to music and attraction to the boulghari as early as the age of 3 or 4, Srko told his wife to keep the instrument from the boy, so that he wouldn’t grow up to be a “chalghujuh” (derogatory term for a professional folk musician). He did, however, encourage Armenag to sing in church, and asked the local teacher to teach the child liturgical singing at the age of 5 or 6. Shah-Mouradian began to sing at Moush’s St. Marine church at the age of 8, and remembered that his first solo was “Amen Hayr Soorp” in the Second Mode (ԲՁ). His father also asked an older local boy who attended the “United Associations” high school to teach Shah-Mouradian Armenian patriotic songs. After attending the local grammar school, Armenag himself also attended the “United Associations” high school in Moush.

It was around this time that Shah-Mouradian began to be noticed by the outside world. In 1885, the legendary Khrimian Hayrig passed through Moush on his way to Constantinople, and encouraged the small child’s singing. The young singer also began participating in services at the renowned Soorp Garabed monastery out in the countryside. In the same year, he began high school, and while there he met political and revolutionary leader Mihran Damadian who had become the head of the school. At the time a Hunchag, who organized the First Sassoun Rebellion in 1894, Damadian later founded the Ramgavar Party. Damadian, like the others, encouraged his singing career. While at the school, Shah-Mouradian learned Armenian “Hampartsoum” notation from teacher Garabed Malkhasian, who had studied in Echmiadzin. Hampartsoum notation was the traditional way that Armenians used to notate music in a modal style before the community adopted European notation; it had been developed by Hampartsoum Limonjian and his colleagues in the early 1800s in Constantinople and used to transcribe the entirety of the sharagan repertoire and the Armenian badarak songs, which were published in book form for the first time in Echmiadzin in the 1870s.

In 1889, Shah-Mouradian’s father died. Mgrdich Kharakhanian, the new prelate of Moush, took responsibility for the budding singer’s education. He sent Shah-Mouradian to the “Jarankavorats” school at St. Garabed Monastery; despite being a student there himself, he taught singing to the other boys. After a year and a half there, hating the monastery life, he ran away from the school and returned to the city, but continued to perform on the feast days of Vartavar and Asdvadzadzin for the tens of thousands of pilgrims who visited the monastery from all parts of the Ottoman and Russian empires. In 1892, Kharakhanian decided to send him to study at Echmiadzin’s Kevorkian Jemaran. During his first school year, musician Kristapor Kara-Mourza, who had introduced 4-part harmony into Armenian music, was his teacher as well as the choir director, and Gomidas Vartabed was a student there finishing up his final classes. Shah-Mouradian, who had never heard 4-part harmony before, described his first impressions of the music as the “ridiculous braying of donkeys.” Appointed soloist along with future composer Grikor Mirzaian Suni, Shah-Mouradian was destined to make his career in the Western-style music which initially repelled him.

Shah-Mouradian, who had already reached the rank of “tasabed” (leader of cantorial singing during chapel), had little new to learn of Armenian traditional chant or traditional notation. But Echmiadzin opened a new chapter in his life, after Khrimian Hayrig was elected Catholicos and appointed Gomidas Vartabed music teacher for the 1893-94 school year, beginning a lifelong collaboration between the two men that became legendary in the annals of Armenian music.

After a students’ revolt at Echmiadzin in fall 1894 and the removal of all students born in Turkey, Shah-Mouradian was transferred to the Nersisyan School in Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia). There, he came under the mentorship of the school’s music teacher Magar Yegmalian, whose 4-part harmony setting of the badarak became the first to be officially accepted by the Armenian Apostolic Church in 1895. At the time Yegmalian’s choir performed during services at the Tiflis Armenian cathedral, and Shah-Mouradian was the soloist - until the Russians put him in jail. In late 1895, during a roundup of Hunchag party members and other revolutionaries, Shah-Mouradian refused to reveal the whereabouts of a friend named “Mshetsi Yeznig,” a writer for the newspaper Artzagank who had been exposing the maltreatment of Armenians in the Moush region of the Ottoman Empire. The Russian authorities put the singer in jail for three months. When he got out, Yegmalian made him choir director - arguably the first choir director to lead church services using the Yegmalian version of the badarak after it had been officially sanctioned. 

Shah-Mouradian frequently attended the Royal Opera in Tiflis and became enamored of Western music. Gomidas Vartabed and Yegmalian both advised him to go to Europe to study. But the singer, along with other students influenced by the revolutionary movements, began to organize themselves. Though they didn’t join an official party and only participated in general protests and demonstrations, the Russian police arrested the singer again in 1897. This time, the authorities agreed that he and others arrested on charges of revolutionary activity would be deported back to Turkey. Yegmalian, weeping, came to meet him at the train station as he departed Tiflis. He was transferred from jail to jail until he reached Kars, near the Turkish border. The local Turkish consul Fuad Bey, an open-minded and intelligent man, respected Shah-Mouradian’s talent and requested the government authorities to transfer him to his hometown of Moush and release him. Shah-Mouradian later said that he owed Fuad Bey his life.

After his release in Moush, Shah-Mouradian became a music teacher at St. Garabed monastery for two years. Then, at age 22, he went to Erzurum where he taught music in the schools and directed the local church choir. There, he became the first to introduce the Yegmalian Badarak into Turkey. But he was restless - he never gave up his dream of studying in Europe. Four years later, he went to Trebizond and got on a ship headed for Marseilles, then reached Paris. The year was 1904. He studied in Paris with Pauline Viardot and others. When Gomidas Vartabed visited the city, together they gave demonstrations of Armenian music.

Finally, Shah-Mouradian achieved his dream - a role in grand opera. He debuted in Paris in the opera Faust. Then he toured Europe, Great Britain, and Egypt. In 1913 he went to Constantinople to visit his old teacher, Gomidas, who had moved there a few years prior. He went on to Tiflis, where he appeared in the same concert as Ashough Hazir, the repopularizer of the works of Sayat-Nova. At the end of the year, he returned to Constantinople where in honor of the 1500th anniversary of the Armenian Alphabet, Gomidas Vartabed’s 3-part Badarak was performed in the Armenian Patriarchal Cathedral (Kum Kapu) by the church choir of the Galata parish.

Shah-Mouradian began to give concerts in Constantinople with Gomidas accompanying on piano; he also roomed with Gomidas and the painter Panos Terlemezian. He sang at the funeral of ARF founder Simon Zavarian; he performed at a dinner party and musical evening for the Morgenthaus at the American Embassy. Then at the beginning of 1914, he and Gomidas made 22 recordings for Orfeon Records, which were released in the spring. Two of the songs were from his opera repertoire, the other 20 were Armenian and accompanied on piano or organ by Gomidas Vartabed. They consisted of patriotic songs and religious hymns, and many of them were arrangements by Gomidas or Yegmalian.

In June 1914, Gomidas and Shah-Mouradian traveled to Paris and gave a concert together with Margarit Babayan as part of the 5th Congress of the International Musical Society. The Society would disband with the outbreak of the First World War after the June 28 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Gomidas returned to Constantinople, and with Paris under siege by the Germans, Shah-Mouradian along with his French wife Margeurite and newborn daughter Evelyn fled to the United States. They arrived in New York City in the last week of December, 1914.

In 1915 he began to give concerts in the United States. Then word arrived of the massacres. The concerts turned into benefits - at least one concert, organized by the Detroit ARF, set aside funds for the self-defense of Moush. Shah-Mouradian was joined on the stage numerous times by Armenian-American soprano Zabelle Panosian, also dedicated to raising money for her countrymen. Throughout 1915-1918 they toured the US giving concerts everywhere from Hartford, Connecticut to San Francisco, California. In Fresno, the locals who were natives of Moush gave a private dinner for Shah-Mouradian, their compatriot. He rubbed elbows with the bigshots of the Armenian community, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and the clergy.

In 1917-1918 Shah-Mouradian made another series of recordings with Columbia Records in New York. Many of them were from the same repertoire as his earlier discs. These recordings became incredibly popular in the United States; practically every Armenian family who owned a phonograph in the 1920s had at least one of them, if not several. Writers like William Saroyan and David Kherdian remembered their parents’ generation playing these records as a hallmark of their childhood. 

Throughout the 1920s, Shah-Mouradian continued to perform throughout the United States and indeed the world, and into the 1930s he gradually moved his home base back to France. After the tragic death of Gomidas in 1935, he succumbed to illness himself and passed away in 1939.

The Museum presents here six recordings featuring Armenag Shah-Mouradian accompanied by Gomidas Vartabed, from the private collection of Kapriel Mozian. Additionally, there are two 1918 recordings from the Museums’ own collection. 

1. “Erbor Batzouin”, better known as “Giligia”, this song, recorded in 1914 (Constantinople) is accompanied by Gomidas Vartabed on piano and was composed by Kapriel Yeranian with lyrics by Nahabed Rousinian, loosely based on Frederic Berat’s French poem “Ma Normandie.” The song is played slower than usual, then speeds up. Gomidas is known to not have liked the typical arrangement of this song, and likely changed it. The lyrics describe patriotism for the medieval Armenian region of Cilicia, a section of present-day southern Turkey on the Mediterranean which was depopulated of Armenians during the 1915 Genocide. Various plans existed during the First World War to liberate Cilicia and establish an Armenian state there with French help, which began to be implemented but ultimately failed.

2. “Hayastan”, another composition of Kapriel Yeranian, this song is listed as an arrangement of Gomidas. The lyrics were written by Hovhannes Mirza-Vanandetsi and describe Armenia in Biblical terms as the location of the Garden of Eden and the cradle of the human race. This song was pointed out by scholars during the controversy over “Mer Hayrenik” as the prime candidate for an alternative Armenian National Anthem. We hear Gomidas’ piano here, again in this 1914 Constantinople recording.

3. “Hayrik, Hayrik,” a poem by Armenagan Party activist Hairabed Janigian set to a folk melody, addresses Khrimian Hayrik and the suffering of his native land, Vasbouragan (the Van region), again left completely bereft of its Armenian population after the Genocide. Again accompanied by Gomidas; Constantinople 1914.

4. “Khorhourd Khorin” (Mystery Profound) is a 12th-century sharagan hymn written by Khachadour of Daron (the Moush Region). It is sung at the very beginning of the badarak or Divine Liturgy (Armenian Apostolic Sunday Mass). The version here is the well-known Gomidas arrangement of the song, which differs considerably from the simpler Yegmalian version that is typically heard. Again, Gomidas accompanies on the organ in this 1914 Constantinople recording.

5. “Kristos Pataraguial” (Christ is Sacrificed) is a hymn sung during the badarak just before the Communion. This version is the well-known arrangement of Magar Yegmalian. It is accompanied by Gomidas in the 1914 Constantinople recording.

6. “Syrouhis” (My Beloved) is an Armenian love song the arrangement of which is usually attributed to Yegmalian. A performance favorite of Shah-Mouradian, the song combines two meters, a slow section and a quick one. The piano accompaniment is by Gomidas and the recording was made in 1914 in Constantinople.

7. “Hov Arek” (Hov arek sarer jan = Let the winds blow, dear mountains) is an Armenian folk song arranged by Gomidas Vartabed. His student Shah-Mouradian records it here with a session orchestra at Columbia Records in New York City, in 1918.

8. “Giligia” (Cilicia) is a reprise of “Erbor Batzouin” and was recorded with a session orchestra at Columbia Records in New York City, in 1918.

A special thanks to Jesse Kenas Collins, Harry Kezelian, and Harout Arakelian whose ongoing contributions of research and consultation have been critical to assembling the recordings and writings presented here. We also thank the families and individuals who have been donating Armenian records to our collection since 1971.