Looking for sanctity amid modern noise, Arvo Pärt fled to the West to escape Soviet censorship. For some time now, the “composer of silence” has proclaimed that every sound should be loved.
In 1980, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and his family emigrated to Austria after his works were banned in the Soviet Union and he was labelled a traitor by the press in his home country. The story goes that they were stopped by border guards at the railway station in Brest, Belarus. They had seven suitcases containing sheet music, records and tapes, and the guards demanded, strangely, that they play the records. And in the quiet of the dawn, Cantus, Pärt’s string piece that has since become one of his best-known works, rang out, followed by Missa Syllabica. “That may have been the first time in the history of the USSR,” the composer later joked, “that policemen were caught being kind.”
Pärt’s life is full of stories like this, which tell not only of the harsh political conditions under which his talent had to find its way, but also of how his music speaks to everyone. His art is often compared to Bach’s, as he has composed many liturgical pieces and his fans include believers and atheists alike. He is a creator whose reach extends beyond the narrow context of classical music, with an appeal to artists as diverse as violinist Gidon Kremer and Icelandic singer Björk, or rock musicians like Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. For years, he has been the most-played contemporary composer alongside John Williams, even though his art does not aim to conform to the world – indeed, in many ways it defies it.
Born in 1935 as an only child, at the age of ten Pärt was already trying his hand at composition. Having played in an orchestra while in secondary school, he started studying composition in Tallinn. He was greatly influenced by his mentor, Heino Eller, who taught a dozen composers from this generation. At that time, Pärt composed in the academy-approved style then in vogue, writing modernist compositions and many film scores. In 1960, he was severely criticized by a critic, whose job it was to uphold Soviet cultural policy, for following in Schoenberg’s footsteps with his composition Nekrolog. Later, Credo caused an even bigger scandal and was banned. “I was robbed,” Pärt later said of a work he did not feel especially committed to, and which caused the regime to attack him.
This represented a turning point, as Pärt condemned himself to eight years of silence while he tried to rediscover and reconstruct music from the simplest elements, greatly influenced by Gregorian chants and Renaissance polyphonic music. In 1972 he converted to Orthodoxy. He named his new compositional style tintinnabuli, which means “little bells.” In his thinking, the music is divided into two voices, one the sound of the bell, the other its prolonged reverberation: “This is the whole secret of tintinnabuli,” he told The New York Times. “The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say – it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken – that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.”
© Birgit Püve
But what is Pärt’s music like? Gidon Kremer believes that “it’s a cleansing of all the noise that surrounds us.” “I was attracted to the unbelievable calm and brilliance of his music, and a seeming simplicity,” said Michael Stipe of rock band R.E.M. In a context where self-serving complexity and empty virtuosity are virtues, Pärt takes a different path.
The piano work Für Alina was among the first works in Pärt’s new style, to be followed closely by Spiegel im Spiegel, which rose to “hit” status. The road to popularity was also paved by the British radio station Classic FM, which broadcast his works frequently, and by ECM, the prestigious record label that had Keith Jarrett and Gidon Kremer record his compositions. Over the past few decades, Pärt has often come to be labelled as a “holy minimalist,” a categorization he dislikes.
Following his emigration, Pärt settled first in Vienna and then in Berlin. Freed from Soviet censorship, he composed religious works on a larger scale, often to Latin or Old Slavonic religious texts. These include Passio (1982), Te Deum (1984) and Miserere (1989), works which truly transport the listener out of this world and time.
When asked about his work, Pärt often stresses that rather than squandering notes, he cherishes them. “Some 30 years ago,” he said in 2007, “I was in my great desperation ready to ask anyone how a composer ought to write music. I met a street-sweeper who gave me a remarkable reply. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the composer would probably need to love each and every sound.’ This was a turning point. This self-evident truth completely surprised my soul, which was thirsting for God.”
The other important factor is silence. Pärt himself does not go to concerts or opera, and instead of listening to music he encourages people to find their inner silence. He considers the overindulgence of Western man to be as harmful as Soviet censorship.
Although he keeps his distance from politics, Pärt dedicated his Symphony No. 4 to the formerly imprisoned Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2006, he dedicated his concerts to the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the assassinated Russian journalist. He did so despite declaring: “I am not a politician; I’m a dilettante. But this is the normal thinking of people who came through this Soviet hell.” It was in 1992 that he first went back to Estonia, which now considers him its most famous native. In 2018, the Arvo Pärt Centre was built in a village near Tallinn, giving home to the composer’s personal archive and works, as well as serving as a library, concert venue and educational institution. The modern building was designed by the Spanish architectural firm Nieto Sobejano, its geometry inspired by silence and the patterns of Pärt’s music.
