German-Armenian Ties Live On In Music

By the time my husband Michael and I arrived in Yerevan for our annual visit, the shipment was waiting in customs for the final bureaucratic procedures to be completed. On April 26, we visited the Conservatory, and later that day, the scores arrived at their final destination. Prof. Mher Navoyan, who greeted us warmly at the Conservatory, was delighted. As he had written in various communications with the Berlin Embassy and with us, the Conservatory would be most grateful to have such material for instruction.

Navoyan, who is chairman of the Academic Council, took us on a tour of the music school, named after the famous musicologist and composer Vardaped Komitas. His presence is everywhere. In the large entry hall, a huge bust dominates the vast wall, and greets everyone who passes through the monumental doors. In every room or corridor, as well as in the library, there are portraits of him gazing down at us. In the library, we are shown the reams of musical scores that students can borrow for research or practice. Some are organized in special collections, named after the persons who have donated their libraries to the conservatory. All the works in the library, whether scores or books, are catalogued both on index cards filed alphabetically in sturdy, traditional cabinets, with pullout drawers, all made of wood, and in computers in digital form. There are separate rooms hosting the collections of recorded music, on CD’s, records and DVD’s; here students can come to listen to and view performances.

A very special department is dedicated to ethnomusicology. In the tradition of Komitas, the department head has worked for years on compiling and editing traditional Armenian songs, which have been published in separate volumes according to region of origin. She showed us several of the volumes, as well as a huge book with the musical notation system of Komitas.

When we arrived in the office of Rector Shahen Shahinyan, Navoyan showed him some of the bound volumes that we had brought with us on the plane. These were a couple of collectors’ items which had been in bad repair, due to age and had been rebound. They included works by Beethoven and Mahler, among others, in beautiful editions. Shahinyan, who is a violinist, thanked us for the gift and wanted to know more about the foundation and the donor. My husband Michael explained that we were merely the messengers; it was Sabine Meerwein who made the donation, and we arranged for the transportation and delivery.

We learned that the Armenian musical education system has deep ties to the German system. Not only Komitas, but virtually every Armenian composer visited and/or studied in Germany, establishing a tradition that goes back in time. In the modern period, when Armenia was a Soviet republic, it had established 300 music schools, which exist to the present day. These are schools where students go for individual instruction, separately from the elementary or high schools they attend. If one considers that the population is about 3 million that represents a ratio of one music school for every 10,000 citizens! The problem that music schools, including the conservatory, face is financial backing, to provide the teaching materials required. For music schools, this may be manifest in the lack of instruments. In the case of the conservatory, it is musical scores that are extremely costly. So the hundreds of quality scores donated by Meerwein are most appropriate and highly appreciated. Given the close link between the German and Armenian musical traditions, it is also fitting that the lion’s share of the scores are for works in the classical German repertoire, from Bach and Beethoven, to Brahms, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, and so on, issued by traditional German music publishers, many of whom hold the copyrights for the original (Urtext) editions. In addition, there are works by leading French, Italian and Russian composers. On Navoyan’s suggestion, the conservatory has decided to place these scores in a section of the library named after Bernhard Scheidt.

But the reason why this estate ended up in Yerevan is a story in itself. Neither Bernhard Scheidt nor Sabine Meerwein have Armenian roots. Or rather, Armenian family roots. As Meerwein explained when she first inquired about the foundation, her great-grandfather, Gustav Adolf Meerwein, was a Protestant pastor in Germany during World War I. Though it is not clear to what extent he might have had personal contact with Johannes Lepsius, he was well aware of his efforts to save Armenians. He knew Lepsius’s Report on the Situation of the Armenian People, which had alerted German public opinion to the genocide. In 1916, Lepsius had issued a call for Germans to save Armenian orphans, essentially by paying for their freedom and placing them in Christian foster families. Great-grandfather Meerwein had answered the call, even at the personal level. He pledged that, for every grandchild he would be blessed with, he would finance the adoption of an Armenian orphan and arrange for placement in a foster family. Sabine Meerwein estimates that up to nine Armenian children found homes this way. She said she was making the donation not only in memory of Bernhard Scheidt but also in memory of her ancestor.