“Less is More”: Arvo Pärt at 90

The chorus – first women’s voices and then the full vocal ensemble – sings the single word “Credo” (I believe). The musical language is harmonically reassuring and euphonious, falling easily on the ear – and from a rich vocal climax on that one word a solo piano emerges, playing J.S. Bach’s first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, the one in the key of C, from which all music seems to grow. 

It’s an arresting opening to a work that becomes increasingly combative as it grapples with the question of faith, juxtaposed with the notion of “an eye for an eye” from the Sermon on the Mount and its message of don’t respond to evil with more evil. 

The work is Arvo Pärt’s powerful Credo, first heard in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1968 under the baton of Neeme Järvi. The audience was left stunned by the piece, and demanded a repeat. Shortly after, Credo was banned by the Soviet authorities who would continue to hound both composer and conductor. Pärt’s music ceased to be performed, prompting a long period when he found a new musical voice, emerging in 1976 and writing in a style what he has called tintinnabula (in essence, using two distinct voices: a melodic voice that moves step-wise through a scale, and a tintinnabuli voice that uses only notes from the tonic triad of the piece). Järvi and family decided to emigrate to the US, and they have remained loyal champions of Pärt’s music ever since. Estonia would finally regain its independence in 1991 following the so-called Singing Revolution, when the country used its massed voices to signal its resistance to its Russian occupiers. And the work would be heard again in the country of its birth (as it was earlier this year when Neeme’s son Paavo performed – and recorded – it at his annual festival in Pärnu).

On September 11 the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt celebrates his 90th birthday, and from his large output, Credo stands out, not only as the first piece in which he gave musical expression to his faith, but because – as he himself has said – it marked his farewell to serial (12-tone) composition and heralded a new period in his music. And his new musical language has captured the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of people ever since. The nature of Pärt’s popularity is rare for a “classical” composer, because his appeal is embraced by music-lovers of all kinds, not just the typical classical music aficionado, as he receives adulation from the critics as readily as from a lover of rock or jazz. His music is often used in film and TV – how many times has his Spiegel im Spiegel cropped up as a soundtrack. He really found a universal voice. 

My introduction to Arvo Pärt’s music came with the 1984 ECM album that took its name from what would become one of the composer’s most popular works, Tabula Rasa. The album – it also contained Fratres (twice) and the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten – was genuinely groundbreaking, a tribute both to the way Pärt’s music meshed perfectly with the Zeitgeist, but also to ECM’s legendary founder and producer Manfred Eicher’s genius at spotting talent, be it in a composer or a performer (the first track, the violin-and-piano version of Fratres is played by Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett, no less! There are two fascinating programmes on medici.tv, the documentary Gidon Kremer: Finding Your Own Voice and a concert from the Fondation Louis Vuitton which find him performing a number of Pärt’s now-classic works). The mood – perhaps even more than that, the message – of the works on the album was not specific, but seemed to reach out to a generation for whom religious belief no longer played a central role in their life, but who craved some kind of spiritual connection to the world and those around them. And Pärt’s music filled that gap. And though many of Pärt’s choral works are religious in text and intent, they connected with listeners on a very primal level, their often slow-moving, harmonically rich language providing a deep and powerful reassurance. 

“Each of us has his own destiny and his own relationship with his creator based on his own experiences” Arvo Pärt says in the course of another fine documentary, The Lost Paradise, a portrait of Arvo Pärt, in which the director Robert Wilson stages Adam’s Passion, a work about Adam’s fall from Paradise. And in that statement, Pärt perhaps provides a key to his universal appeal, he writes intensely personal music that anyone can interpret in their own way. (You can also watch the entire Adam’s Passion, featuring a fine line-up of soloists, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste, as a separate film. Staged in an old submarine factory in Tallinn, it is as visually arresting as the music, and quite mesmerising.)

It’s said, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve it, that Arvo Pärt is the most-performed classical composer of our time. As we mark this auspicious birthday, let’s listen to (and watch!) what makes his musical voice unique. He has perhaps managed to crystallise that much sought-after, though all too often seldom achieved, mantra, “Less is more”. In a world where there is so much noise, Pärt’s music has the ability to take us outside time, and into a world of quietness, but quietness of such richness and profound personal meaning.