Arvo Pärt

• Born: September 11, 1935
• Place of Birth: Paide, Estonia

ESTONIAN CLASSICAL COMPOSER

Pärt’s music, with its spiritual aspects and overt references to earlier styles, is classified as mystic minimalism.

The Life

Arvo Pärt was born and grew up in Paide, Estonia, when the Soviet Union controlled the country. His parents separated when he was young, and he moved with his mother to the town of Rakvere, where he received his early musical training. In 1954 Pärt moved to Tallinn, the capital, to study at the Music Middle School (the equivalent of undergraduate work). After serving in the military for two years, he completed his course of study, and he was admitted to the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957.

Once he entered the conservatory, his curriculum expanded beyond music courses to include such Soviet-mandated subjects as atheism and Communist history. Pärt worked as a recording engineer for Estonian radio during his student years. He also received commissions for film and theater music, and thus he had amassed a significant body of professional work by the time he completed his education.

While Estonia is more influenced by the West than other former Soviet states because of its location, Pärt grew up in the musical and political shadow of Moscow. In the 1970s, as he began to display a new and internationally acclaimed style, life in the Soviet Union became more difficult. Because his wife was Jewish, and the family was thus eligible for exit visas, Pärt and his family left Tallinn in 1980, ostensibly for Israel. They ended up in Vienna, where the composer Alfred Schnittke had arranged assistance for them. The following year, the family settled in Berlin.

The Music

Pärt’s oeuvre traces many of the twentieth century’s musical styles, including early works in a neoclassical idiom and later works in a serial style. In the 1970’s, he developed a personal style based on the concept he called tintinnabuli—the ringing of bells. Fundamentally a two-voice style, tintinnabuli uses a melodic voice, which moves around a central pitch, and the tintinnabuli voice, which outlines the tonic triad. The tintinnabuli works, whose structure is predetermined by number or by textual outline, are rhythmically simple and do not change tempo.

Tintinnabuli developed out of a period of intense study after Pärt’s piece Credo from 1968. Credo, with its overtly religious title and content, was a popular success and a lightning rod for the Soviet censors, and it was banned in the Soviet Union for ten years following its premiere (which was conducted by Neeme Järvi). After immersing himself in a study of early vocal music, Pärt exhibited the beginnings of a new style in Symphony No. 3. However, it was not until 1976 that Pärt’s concept of tintinnabuli truly emerged in his music. Works from this period include Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Fratres, Summa, and Tabula Rasa.

Works from the 1980s on are mostly choral or chamber pieces, often with a religious or spiritual aspect. Notable is the Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Joannem, based on the gospel of John, a piece of enormous scale and drama, which is considered the pinnacle of the tintinnabuli style. In 1994 Pärt wrote Litany: Prayers of Saint John Chrysostom for Each Hour of the Day and Night, which uses a full orchestra for the first time since Symphony No. 3.

Credo. This work, for piano solo, chorus, and orchestra, is not the traditional liturgical Credo. The opening words are “Credo in Jesum Christum”; the rest of the text comes from the gospel of Matthew and sets two lines: “You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” and “But I say unto you: do not resist evil.” The dialectic of the text—violence opposed to passive resistance, Old Testament and New—is reflected in the music, which moves from tonality to twelve-tone structure and back. The work is complex and shifts easily between styles. Notably, the tonal portions of the piece are represented by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose Prelude in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722) is quoted and reworked.

This quotation frames the piece. While the middle section uses twelve-tone techniques, its row is built of perfect fifths. In spite of the serial techniques Pärt used, the work’s essential harmonic movement is a familiar path from C to G, which is reinforced in the work’s conclusion and which further echoes Bach’s prelude.

Spiegel im Spiegel. This piece, whose title translates as “mirror in the mirror,” follows the group of works that were collectively titled “tintinnabuli,” and it offers a clear example of the techniques used in this style. For the first thirty-two measures, the piano (the tintinnabuli voice) outlines an F major triad in second inversion with occasional variations. The violin part is centered around A, and it creates a melody around that center by a simple process of adding notes. The tintinnabuli voice changes to accommodate the violin, echoing its adding pitches. The additive process of creating a melody, combined with the unchanging rhythm and tempo, make this work typical of tintinnabuli. Spiegel im Spiegel also exists in versions for cello, viola, clarinet, and horn.

Litany. In Litany: Prayers of Saint John Chrysostom for Each Hour of the Day and Night, which is divided into two large sections of twelve prayers, each setting has a similar structure, though they vary greatly in length. While the tintinnabuli techniques are still in use, they are obscured in this work, partly by the size of the ensemble and partly by the stylistic moderations made by Pärt. While the work still uses the instrumental forces to highlight text or echo the melodic voices, the alternation between strings and winds blurs those distinctions.

Musical Legacy

Although Pärt has done little film scoring, his music has been used successfully in commercial films and documentaries around the world. Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten was used by Michael Moore in the film Fahrenheit 9/11. Pärt’s music has also been extensively set by choreographers, including John Neumeier and the Pilobolus Dance Company. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for best classical contemporary composition in 2009 for his fourth symphony, entitled Los Angeles.

Pärt’s music is some of the most performed internationally. His work was featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival in 2006, and it was celebrated at the RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin in 2008. The relative simplicity of his music and its spiritual content make it popular with audiences.

Pärt was the recipient of numerous awards during the late 2010s and early 2020s. In 2017, he was granted the Ratzinger Prize by Germany. The composer was then granted an honorary doctorate by the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music. In 2021, Pärt was admitted to the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2023, he won the Polar Music Prize. The following year, Pärt was granted the prestigious Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Bibliography

Fisk, Josiah. “The New Simplicity: The Music of Górecki, Tavener, and Pärt.” Hudson Review 47, no. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 394-412.

Hillier, Paul. Arvo Pärt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Lockheart, Florence. "RPS Awards Gold Medal to Arvo Pärt." Classical Music, 16 Sept. 2024, www.classical-music.uk/news/article/rps-awards-gold-medal-to-arvo-part. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.

Quinn, Peter. “Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Pärt’s Credo.” Tempo, New Series, no. 211 (January, 2000): 16-20.

Smith, Geoff. “An Interview with Arvo Pärt.” The Musical Times 140, no. 1868 (Autumn, 1999): 19-22, 24-25.