“Who is Arvo Pärt? A musical mystic? A reclusive loner? A pioneer of the faded "New Simplicity"? A neotonal minimalist? A religious composer of confessional music? Probably a little of all of these. For a long time, he was an outsider who didn't fit into any category, and depending on one's perspective, he was assigned the role of either a nobody or a secret tip. In Germany, for decades he was under the condemnation of the Darmstadt opinion cartel and its successors, while in the Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere, where people think more pragmatically about aesthetics, his CDs sold splendidly. In Soviet Estonia, he was largely kept away from musical life as a highly suspicious individualist, while in informed circles he was considered an oppositional phantom.
In 1980, Pärt and his family moved to the West, and now his slow transformation from outsider to successful composer began. This may be surprising given his introverted, religiously grounded music, whose tone is one of humility. But that was precisely the secret of his success: the gentle, inwardly derived power of persuasion that culminates in an unmistakable personal style. The zeitgeist has since changed. In the diversity of postmodernism, Pärt's music now finds its undisputed place.
In Estonia, where he returned in 2008, he has built a considerable life for himself. Today, he can reap the rewards of his over sixty years of work as a composer. The publicity-shy Pärt, who always appears with monastic modesty, has become the world's most performed composer in the field of contemporary music, on par with film composer John Williams.
In his homeland of Estonia, he is celebrated as a musical prince; his music has the status of a national treasure, a subsidized cultural asset intended to carry the fame of Estonia as a cultural nation out into the wider world. The spiritual ascetic thus becomes a representative, a highly effective self-promoter. In Laulasmaa, in the light pine forests south of the capital Tallinn, stands the Arvo Pärt Centre, equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, including an archive, research center, concert hall, and private residence. A cultural hotspot to which national significance is attached.
Pärt, who as a five-year-old experienced first the invasion of the Wehrmacht, learned to play the piano at home, the oboe and drums at school, and later played the drums in the Soviet military orchestra. At the Tallinn Conservatory, his composition teacher Heino Eller introduced him to Palestrina, the pre-revolutionary Russian composers, and twelve-tone technique – the latter using smuggled textbooks by Ernst Krenek and Herbert Eimert.
With his first attempts at twelve-tone composition around 1960 and with "Perpetuum mobile," a piece premiered at the "Warsaw Autumn" festival in 1963 and dedicated to Luigi Nono, he aroused the suspicion of the Party. He fell completely out of favor in 1968 with the cantata "Credo." While it was celebrated by the audience at its premiere in Tallinn under Neeme Järvi, its Christian confession and bruitist attacks earned Pärt a summons for questioning.
This also marked the end of his first artistic phase. During long years of reflection and experimentation, his "Tintinnabuli style" emerged, derived from the Latin word for little bells. It has become his trademark. Its basic elements are the scale and the triad, which are integrated into a "highly formalized compositional system" (Pärt). This often gives the works a slightly ritualistic character, inviting meditative listening, especially in the context of the ubiquitous a subtly shimmering religious background. Among the first to recognize the appeal of these sounds and the ideas behind them were the violinist Gidon Kremer and the CD producer Manfred Eicher. The album "Tabula Rasa," released by ECM in 1984, on which Keith Jarrett also collaborated alongside Kremer, is a long-selling album with cult status.
Pärt, who professes the Orthodox faith, has over the years become a religious ambassador of music and has been showered with countless awards and honorary titles, not least from religious institutions. His works have been performed in the Vatican, where he received the Joseph Ratzinger Prize, or, as a sign of reconciliation between religions, before religious dignitaries in Istanbul. The performance of "Adam's Passion," the musical theater piece about the fall of man staged by Robert Wilson in Tallinn in 2015, was a brilliant collaborative work by two masters of deceleration, with sounds and images of luminous beauty (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 18, 2015).
Currently, Pärt is once again at the top of international concert calendars. In his homeland, there is a Pärt Festival. He plays, and conductor Paavo Järvi has just released a CD album with the Estonian Festival Orchestra (Alpha Records), which features not only timeless hits like "Credo" and "Fratres" but also his most recent composition, the simply childlike "Estonian Lullaby." A great honor for the composer, who turns ninety.” [1]
1. Wenn Demut zum Werbeträger wird: Aus dem Widerstand zur Marktführerschaft: Arvo Pärt, der am meisten gespielte lebende Komponist der Welt, wird neunzig Jahre alt. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 11 Sep 2025: 9. MAX NYFFELER
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