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The music of Arvo Pärt: from fierce dissonance to euphonious bell sounds

Which titles spring to mind on hearing the name of Arvo Pärt? Sonatina opus 1; Symphony no. 1; Perpetuum mobile, or Fratres; Für Alina; Spiegel im Spiegel? My guess is the second series, for in the nineties Pärt conquered the world with pieces like these. The audience flocked in droves to immerse themselves in his euphonious sound world, though critics deprecatingly dubbed this a ‘warm tub’, full of new-age kitsch. Nowadays Pärt is one of the most performed living composers, but his road to so called ‘new simplicity’ was long and bumpy.

Arvo Pärt (Paide, Estonia 1935) grew up in a dictatorship: in 1944, during the Second World War, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union. For years a strong and intolerant wind blew, especially in the field of the arts. In 1948, barely three years after the victory over the Nazis and their brutal persecution of so-called “entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) great composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were publicly pilloried for their “formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies”. In such a climate there was little room for experimentation.

Pärt studied composition at the Conservatory of Tallin, where he was trained in the standard classical style. The atonal music of modernists such as Arnold Schönberg was taboo. Pärt’s earliest pieces, including the above-mentioned Sonatina for piano solo, therefore have a classical character. They are completely tonal and always return to the keynote – as a listener you ‘come home’ safely. This in no way implies they are insignificant, however. Anyone listening to his Vier leichte Tanzstücke für Klavier will be immediately struck by the frisky atmosphere of these fairy-tale inspired miniatures.

‘Western decadence’

As it happens, the young Pärt was also attracted to the most strongly forbidden fruits, in his case those of the Western avant-garde. He studied smuggled-in scores and began to incorporate the new compositional techniques into his own pieces. In 1961 he caused a scandal with the orchestral work Nekrolog, the first Estonian composition written in the twelve-tone system designed by Schoenberg.

In short, in twelve-tone music all twelve semitones are equal. Each of them is placed in a tone row that must sound in its entirety before it can be used again: no longer the keynote can ‘boss’ it over the other ones. It is a tragic form of irony that intensely socialist way of composing was so despised by the Soviets. Nekrolog brought Pärt his first recognition in the West, but the apparatchiks in his own country accused him of ‘Western decadence’.

Collage

Pärt then experimented with so-called collage techniques, in which different musical styles collide as it were. In Collage über B-A-C-H a sweet theme in oboe and harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach is ‘assaulted’ by fierce, heavily dissonant chords of a string orchestra. In his grand Credo for choir, piano and orchestra a Bach prelude is ‘attacked’ by unusually dissonant harmonies from the orchestra. Its premiere in 1968 caused an even bigger scandal than Nekrolog. Perhaps more than the music itself its unveiled confession of faith was the stumbling block: Pärt had set Latin texts from the Gospel of Matthew. The piece opens with the sentence ‘Credo in Jesum Christum’ (I believe in Jesus Christ).

The communist regime was averse to religion and saw Credo as an open provocation. The political leaders felt personally attacked and embarked on a cat-and-mouse game with Pärt. Sometimes he was razed to the ground, at other times he was praised – similar to how Shostakovich was treated in Russia. But Pärt himself was unhappy too with the path he had taken: increasingly he felt that ‘atonal music is only suitable for writing music of conflict’, he once said. After Credo he fell into a compositional impasse that lasted for years.

Tintinnabuli

He immersed himself in early music, such as Russian Orthodox church music, Gregorian chant and Flemish polyphony from the Renaissance. He said: ‘Gregorian chant brought me a kind of cosmic secret, which reveals itself in the art of combining two or three notes.’ In 1977 this led to an explosion of pieces in Pärt’s now world-famous ‘tintinnabuli’ style, named after the bell-like sound of triads. Compositions such as Für Alina for piano solo, Fratres for wind and string quintet and Spiegel im Spiegel for violin and piano boast a typical slow rhythmic pace of melodious harmonies over which a tuneful melody unfolds step by step.

The rest is history. In 1980 Pärt moved to the West, where he began a musical triumph that has not yet come to an end. In the meantime the criticism has silenced, his music appeared on countless CDs and his eightieth and eighty-fifth birthdays were celebrated with an unprecedented number of concerts and other commemorations.

In the meantime the composer has moved back to Estonia, where he’s living in Tallin. I met him there some years ago, at a festival for new music. In all modesty he was sitting on a wobbly wooden bench in a tiny hall, next to younger colleagues such as Erkki-Sven Tüür and Helena Tulve. Concentrated, he listened to a performance of his opus 1 by a piano student. Afterwards I shook his hand and thanked him for his beautiful piece. Pärt reacted with a joyful, almost shy smile. – A memory I will always cherish.

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