Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music.

Although Estonia had been an independent state at the time of Pärt's birth, the Soviet Union occupied it in 1940 as a result of the Soviet–Nazi Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; and the country would then remain under Soviet domination—except for the three-year period of German wartime occupation—for the next 51 years.

Pärt's works are generally divided into two periods.

He composed his early works using a range of neo-classical styles influenced by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Bartók.

He then began to compose using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and serialism.

This, however, not only earned the ire of the Soviet establishment but also proved to be a creative dead-end.

During the 1950s, he also completed his first vocal composition, the cantata Meie aed ('Our Garden') for children's choir and orchestra.

His first serious study came in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Middle School, but less than a year later he temporarily abandoned it to fulfill military service, playing oboe and percussion in the army band.

After his military service he attended the Tallinn Conservatory, where he studied composition with Heino Eller and it was said of him, "he just seemed to shake his sleeves and the notes would fall out".

From 1957 to 1967, he worked as a sound producer for the Estonian public radio broadcaster Eesti Rahvusringhääling.

Tikhon Khrennikov criticized Pärt in 1962 for employing serialism in Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone music written in Estonia, which exhibited his "susceptibility to foreign influences".

But nine months later Pärt won First Prize in a competition of 1,200 works, awarded by the all-Union Society of Composers, indicating the Soviet regime's inability to agree on what was permissible.

He graduated in 1963.

As a student, Pärt produced music for film and the stage.

His first overtly sacred piece, Credo (1968), was a turning point in his career and life; on a personal level he had reached a creative crisis that led him to renounce the techniques and means of expression used so far; on a social level the religious nature of this piece resulted in him being unofficially censured and his music disappearing from concert halls.

For the next eight years he composed very little, focusing instead on study of medieval and Renaissance music to find his new musical language.

In his work Credo (1968), written for solo piano, orchestra, and chorus, he employed avant-garde techniques.

Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented.

Pärt's music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant.

In 1972 he converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity.

Pärt reemerged as a composer in 1976 with music in his new compositional style and technique, tintinnabuli.

His most performed works include Fratres (1977), Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), and Für Alina (1976).

Familiar works by Pärt are Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell (1977) and the string quintet Fratres I (1977, revised 1983), which he transcribed for string orchestra and percussion, the solo violin "Fratres II" and the cello ensemble "Fratres III" (both 1980).

Pärt is often identified with the school of minimalism and, more specifically, that of mystic minimalism or holy minimalism.

He is considered a pioneer of the latter style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.

Although his fame initially rested on instrumental works such as Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel, his choral works have also come to be widely appreciated.

In this period of Estonian history, Pärt was unable to encounter many musical influences from outside the Soviet Union except for a few illegal tapes and scores.

From 2011 to 2018, and again in 2022, Pärt was the most performed living composer in the world, and the second most performed in 2019, after John Williams.

On 10 December 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Pärt a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture for a five-year renewable term.

In 2014 The Daily Telegraph described Pärt as possibly "the world's greatest living composer" and "by a long way, Estonia's most celebrated export".

When asked how Estonian he felt his music to be, Pärt replied: "I don't know what is Estonian... I don't think about these things."

Unlike many of his fellow Estonian composers, Pärt never found inspiration in the country's epic poem, Kalevipoeg, even in his early works.

Pärt said, "My Kalevipoeg is Jesus Christ."

When Soviet censors banned early works, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries.

In this context, Pärt's biographer, Paul Hillier, observed that "he had reached a position of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures, and he lacked the musical faith and willpower to write even a single note."

The Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, was opened to the public in 2018.

Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia, and was raised by his mother and stepfather in Rakvere in northern Estonia.

He began to experiment with the top and bottom notes of the family's piano as the middle register was damaged.

Pärt's musical education began at the age of seven when he began attending music school in Rakvere.

By his early teenage years, Pärt was writing his own compositions.