'Komitas is to Armenians what Chopin is to Poles: their musical genius. ...He wandered around villages collecting songs. He established tens, others say hundreds, of Armenian choirs. He was a wandering balladeer; he improvised epics; he sang. He created hundreds of compositions, magnificent, great, known to all the Philharmonic orchestras of the world. He wrote masses, sung to this day in Armenian churches.

In 1915 the massacre of Armenians began in Turkey. Until the time of Hitler, it was the greatest massacre in world history: 1.5 million Armenians perished. Turkish soldiers dragged Komitas up on a cliff from which they were going to push him. At the last minute his pupil, the Sultan of Istanbul’s daughter, saved him. But he had already seen the abyss, and this made him lose his mind.

...He lived on for twenty more years. He did not make a sound.' --Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (1993)