Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt was born on 11 September 1935 in Paide, a small town in Estonia, then an independent Baltic country, which was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. His parents separated when he was three, and he went to live with his mother in Rakvere. As a child he played on an old piano some of whose keys no longer worked, which forced him to imagine other sounds. He began composing very young and listened passionately to concerts broadcast on the radio.

After military service he entered the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, studying composition with Heino Eller. He graduated in 1963. Meanwhile, from 1957 to 1967, he worked as a sound engineer at Estonian radio, which let him hear a great deal of music and develop a very fine ear. He also composed more than fifty film scores, notably for Estonian animated films. He was one of the most promising Soviet composers of his generation.

Pärt was interested in modern Western music, hard to access in the USSR. In 1960 he composed Nekrolog, the first Estonian work to use Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, which drew sharp criticism from the Soviet authorities, who considered the style decadent. In the 1960s he composed works combining quotations from Bach with avant-garde music, such as Collage on B-A-C-H (1964) and his first two symphonies.

In 1968 he composed Credo for piano, chorus and orchestra, which opens with the words “Credo in Jesum Christum” (“I believe in Jesus Christ”). In the officially atheist Soviet Union this religious statement caused a scandal: the work was banned and Pärt was sidelined. He then went through a long creative crisis. For nearly eight years he composed very little. He studied Gregorian chant and medieval and Renaissance polyphony, notably the Notre-Dame school, Machaut and Josquin. Around 1972 he converted to the Orthodox Christian faith.

In 1976 he composed Für Alina, a short piano piece marking the birth of his new style, which he called “tintinnabuli”, from the Latin tintinnabulum, “little bell”. This very spare style combines a melodic voice moving in small steps with a voice that plays only the notes of a triad, like ringing bells. Pärt explains that a single note, beautifully played, can be enough. In 1977 he composed several masterpieces in this style: Fratres, Tabula rasa and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

In 1978 he composed Spiegel im Spiegel (“Mirror in the Mirror”) for violin and piano, a work of great simplicity that became one of the most performed pieces of contemporary music in the world. But his relations with the Soviet authorities remained difficult. In 1980 he emigrated with his wife Nora and their children to Vienna, then settled in West Berlin. The producer Manfred Eicher, founder of the ECM label, discovered his music and in 1984 released the album Tabula rasa, which made it known all over the world.

Pärt composes mainly sacred music, on Latin, Slavonic, German or English texts: Passio (1982), Te Deum (1985), Miserere, Magnificat (1989), Berliner Messe, Kanon Pokajanen. After Estonia regained independence in 1991, he returned to live in his country in the early 2000s. In 2018 the Arvo Pärt Centre, which houses his archives, opened at Laulasmaa, in a forest by the sea. For many years he has been one of the most performed living composers in the world, and his ninetieth birthday was celebrated in 2025 with many concerts.