Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.

Pärt, who turned 90 on 11 September, has retired from public life and ceased to compose. He can still occasionally be glimpsed at the Arvo Pärt Centre, a beautiful glass-encased building that opened in 2018 on the edge of a pine forest close to Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. The composer’s manuscript scores, hand-written musical diaries and library of liturgical texts are archived there. There is a 150-seat concert hall, with a discreet gift shop and café attached. Pärt lives nearby in a house facing the Gulf of Finland. He is the world’s most-performed living composer after John Williams but is said to care little for his fame.

Pärt is sometimes described as a “holy minimalist” owing to the supposed kinship between his music and the repetitive drone syncopations of American minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and John Adams. But Pärt’s music, unlike theirs, carries a sense of pain, lamentation and sorrow; listeners find a spirit-lifting beauty in its sparse, stilled quality and minor-key tonalities. Its slow-moving atmospherics spring from a monastical absorption in the word of God and is not (as Pärt’s detractors sometimes claim) a New Age ambient sound wash. “Modern man has plenty to wail about,” Pärt says, who should know.

One of his greatest compositions, the bracingly solemn Passio (1982), is set to words from the Passion in John’s gospel. With its mood of penitence and rue, the 70-minute work for choir and orchestra considers human fallibility and imperfection, and issues from the stern spirit of Lent. It contains more than 200 bars of silence which are intended to open a space in the listener for contemplation of the divine. In some ways, the music was ahead of its time; its unhurried tempo serves as an antidote to the clamour of viral videos and online shrillness. Non-classical musicians who cite Pärt as an influence – Sigur Rós, Sunn O))), Aphex Twin, Björk, Swans, Floating Points, Lupe Fiasco, Nick Cave – perceive a numinous solace in his music.

Pärt first came to notice in the West in 1977 with Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, written for strings and tolling tubular bell. With its overlapping sheets of sound, this mesmeric six-minute work developed Pärt’s now famous technique of tintinnabuli (Latin for “little bells”), where melody acquires a steady-state, bell-like resonance. The compositional method is not to be taken literally – it is a poetical metaphor – but Pärt’s best-known works since the mid-1970s, whether neo-Baroque instrumental scores such as Fratres or large-scale choral works like Berliner Messe, were composed with a doleful sound of bells in mind.

Pärt was raised in Rakvere in the east of Estonia by his Lutheran mother and Orthodox stepfather. Symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff were broadcast daily from loudspeakers in the market square, and the teenage Pärt bicycled repeatedly round just to listen. During his two years as a Soviet Army conscript in the mid-1950s he played percussion in his regiment’s orchestra but was discharged owing to ill health. In 1957 he enrolled at the Tallinn Conservatory to study under the Estonian composer Heino Eller, whose Polish-Jewish wife, the violinist Anna Kremer, had been murdered in Estonia during the Nazi occupation. The hushed intensity of the sonatas and symphonic poems Eller wrote in Anna’s memory deeply impressed Pärt.

Throughout the 1960s, Pärt worked in Soviet-occupied Tallinn as a sound engineer for Estonian Radio and won a Soviet state composition prize for a Young Pioneer children’s cantata. Much of his work from this time was an exercise in what his Soviet composer friend Alfred Schnittke called “polystylism”: a mash-up of influences. Pärt’s use of collage and atonal asperities after Arnold Schoenberg alienated his conservative-minded Soviet censors, but earned him the respect of avant-garde composers in the West.

In his quest for purity and a coherent style, Pärt began to listen to sacred music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Collage über B-A-C-H (1964) intrudes dissonance and propulsive Stravinsky-like rhythms in re-orchestrated Baroque counterpoint. The style-shifting continued in his playfully discordant first and secondsymphonies, where quotation from Shostakovich jostles with Prokofiev and even a battery of joke-shop squeaky toys used for Dadaist shock effect. The dignified grandeur of the later works is absent from these Brezhnev-era experiments.

A crisis came in 1968 with Pärt’s cantata Credo, in which Latin words from the Christian Creed (Credo in Jesum Christum) are repeated over a passage from Bach. The 32-year-old had eschewed the dry, fruitless “children’s games” (as he now saw them) of his earlier experiments in favour of an emotionally affecting religious meditation. Pärt’s departure from the dense tangle and complexity of modernism has a flavour of a road to Damascus moment. As a declaration of Christian faith, Credo caused a scandal on its Tallinn premiere as it was clearly hostile to Soviet anti-religious legislation. Pärt came under pressure to disown it; he refused and publicly reaffirmed his faith on Estonian Radio. Credo was unofficially banned. Pärt then entered what he called his “silent” period.

For eight years until 1976 he wrote little of consequence other than soundtrack music, though he immersed himself in the works of Dante, and filled notebooks with time signatures, bar lines and quotation from the Psalms, synagogue cantillation and classic vocal polyphony. In Johannes Ockeghem’s hypnotic 15th-century Requiem, Pärt found an aesthetic of purity and reduction that changed utterly the way he thought about music.

During his compositional impasse, Pärt met Nora (Eleanora) Supina, a musicologist and conductor of Jewish descent, who was planning to emigrate to Israel with her parents. Instead she and Pärt converted to Russian Orthodoxy and, in 1972, got married. Nora introduced Pärt to liturgical compositions in Church Slavonic (the language of the Eastern Orthodox rite) and writings by the early Church Fathers. Her influence on Pärt and his music is incalculable.

Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.

With Pärt’s reputation growing in the West, life in Soviet Estonia became untenable for him: his Christian faith made him a “traitor to the motherland”. In the winter of 1980, Pärt was served with a Soviet state eviction notice and “allowed” to emigrate abroad with his wife and infant sons Immanuel and Michael. They packed seven bags and, unsure where they were going, set off in heavy January snow by train from Tallinn. In what is now Belarus they were stopped at Brest-Litovsk railway station by Soviet border police, who examined the music scores, vinyl records and cassette tapes in their luggage but turned a blind eye to the silver crucifix concealed in a baby’s nappy. One of them announced: “Oh, you are musicians, I also played in Estonia.” He wanted to check the tapes. What followed was a sort of spontaneous mass liturgy. In the cathedral-like space of the station’s near-empty customs hall the strains of Pärt’s Britten Cantus welled up. The police were visibly moved.

“I saw the power of music to transform people,” Nora Pärt said later. At Vienna the family were met by the composer Alfred Schnittke and the music publisher Alfred Schlee, who offered Pärt a publishing contract and arranged for the family to stay in the Austrian capital for a year until they could move to West Berlin, where they remained for more than three decades. Pärt wrote his masterworks Te Deum, Miserere and Litany while in Berlin. His 1984 album Tabula Rasa crossed over into jazz and alternative rock audiences and became a cult bestseller. Pärt found himself at the vanguard of the New Simplicity movement in music.

In 2010, two decades after the end of the Cold War, Pärt finally returned to Estonia with his family. His powerful meditation on the implications of man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam’s Lament, was performed later that year in Istanbul at the Byzantine basilica of Hagia Irene. “Let there be delight,” said someone in the audience, before the church filled with grand, hieratic music. Pärt’s last record, Tractus (2023), contains a choral work in honour of the Victorian theologian St John Henry Newman. The music is tinged with an autumnal sense of melancholy and self-examination of an older man – an old Estonian – looking back over an extraordinary life in music.

Ian Thomson, New Statesman, September 10 2025