Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt was born on 11 September 1935 in Paide, a small town in central Estonia. The house where he was born, on Kitsas street, no longer stands. In September 2016 a small music garden was opened on the site, and the composer came to the opening himself. Two limestone sculptures by Riho Kulla stand there, Paesümfoonia and the piano-shaped Loomingu läte, the Source of Creation, and the town’s own website places Pärt in the heart of Paide. Paide made him an honorary citizen in 2009, and since the early 2000s his birthday has been marked with concerts in Paide, Rakvere and Tallinn.

In 1938 the family moved to Rakvere, and that is the town he grew up in. The childhood home stands at Laada street 17. Visiting the house and his old school later in life, he remarked that when he lived there as a child the windows had seemed a little lower. Rakvere remembers him as a boy on a bicycle: the Estonian e-catalogue of monuments lists a monument called Rakvere poiss jalgrattaga, the Rakvere boy with a bicycle, and the Arvo Pärt Centre’s website carries a video clip titled Poiss jalgrattal, Boy on a bicycle. The town made him an honorary citizen in 1995, and its music house dedicated to him is called Ukuaru.

He came to the piano in Rakvere. After the war a children’s music school opened in the town, and Pärt was among its first pupils; he completed it in 1953 in the piano class of Ille Martin. From there he went on to the Tallinn Music School, where his teacher was Veljo Tormis, who had only recently finished his own composer’s diploma at the Moscow Conservatory under Vissarion Shebalin, in 1951 to 1956. Tormis’s pupils included Arvo Pärt and Kuldar Sink. So his first teachers were a piano teacher in a small-town music school and a young composer just back from Moscow.

In 1957 Pärt entered the Tallinn State Conservatoire in the composition class of Heino Eller, and graduated in 1963. Eller’s class also produced Uno Naissoo, Jaan Rääts, Valter Ojakäär and Lepo Sumera. Eller became Pärt’s teacher and friend. When Arvo and Nora Pärt returned to Estonia decades later, they chose Laulasmaa as their home: its pine forest and sandy beach were familiar to them from their youth, and Heino Eller had once lived there.

Work came alongside the studies. From 1958 to 1967 Pärt was a sound engineer at Estonian Radio. In the 1960s Lennart Meri worked in the same house, Pärt in the music department and Meri in radio theatre; the two had known each other since their youth. From these years the Partita (1958) and two piano sonatinas (1958 to 1959) remain in his official list of works. The cultural weekly Sirp describes the composer’s path as a long search that began in neoclassicism, for which Sirp cites those two piano sonatinas, and passed through modernism before the tintinnabuli style matured in 1976.

In 1960 came the orchestral work Nekrolog, the first twelve-tone music written in Estonia and the first dodecaphonic piece performed there. BBC Music Magazine calls it his first mature work, darkly expressive. The Estonian Composers’ Union’s weekly meeting found that “dodecaphonic expression is not suitable for Soviet music”, and Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers, called it “avant-garde bourgeois music”. And yet in 1962 Pärt won first prize among 1 200 works at the All-Union Young Composers’ Competition, for the children’s cantata Meie aed (Our Garden) and the oratorio Maailma samm (Stride of the World). The regime could not agree on what was permissible.

Arvo Pärt Centre: biography · Arvo Pärt Centre: Ground zero. Nekrolog · Arvo Pärt Centre: honorary degrees and awards · Arvo Pärt Centre: Für Lennart in memoriam · Arvo Pärt Centre: the video Poiss jalgrattal (Boy on a bicycle) · Estonian Academy of Sciences: Academician Arvo Pärt at 85 · Estonian Wikipedia: Rakvere Music School · Estonian Music Days: Veljo Tormis · Visit Estonia: the music garden marking Arvo Pärt’s birthplace in Paide · Town of Paide: Arvo Pärt in the heart of Paide · Kuulutaja: Arvo Pärt visited his childhood home and school · Estonian e-catalogue of monuments: Rakvere poiss jalgrattaga (The Rakvere boy with a bicycle) · Ukuaru: Arvo Pärt · Visit Estonia: Arvo Pärt, Laulasmaa · BBC Music Magazine: Arvo Pärt · Sirp: Arvo Pärdi mõttemaastikud (Arvo Pärt’s landscapes of thought) · Wikipedia: Arvo Pärt

At the Conservatoire Pärt studied composition with Heino Eller from 1957 to 1963. His working days, though, passed at Estonian Radio, where he was a sound engineer from 1958 to 1967. Pärt worked in the music department; Lennart Meri worked in radio theatre, and the two had known each other since their youth. Of the student years, two piano sonatinas (1958–1959), a Partita (1958) and the orchestral works Nekrolog (1960), Perpetuum mobile (1963) and Symphony No. 1 (1963) remain in his official list of works. To the pieces of the 1950s and 1960s Pärt still gave opus numbers. Later he gave the numbers up.

Nekrolog (1960) was the first twelve-tone work written in Estonia and the first dodecaphonic piece performed there. At the weekly discussion of the Estonian Composers’ Union the verdict was that ‘dodecaphonic expression is not suitable for Soviet music’. Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers, called it ‘avant-garde bourgeois music’ and singled Pärt out at the Third All-Union Congress in Moscow in March 1962 for his ‘susceptibility to foreign influences’. Nine months later the same composer won first prize among 1 200 works in an all-Union competition, for the children’s cantata Meie aed and the oratorio Maailma samm. The regime could not agree on what was permissible.

There was a second field of work. Pärt’s film music debut came in 1962: Leida Laius’s short feature Õhtust hommikuni, her Moscow film school diploma work, and Heino Pars’s puppet film Väike motoroller, Pars’s first as director. In all Pärt scored eight puppet films by Pars, three features by Laius, among them Mäeküla piimamees (1965), and seven animated films with Elbert Tuganov. Tallinnfilm’s artistic councils and the reviews praised his inventiveness and precision; in 1960–1970 he was among Estonia’s most prolific film composers. In the Soviet years he scored 41 films, trying in film what was forbidden in concert music. He has called it a creative laboratory.

In 1964 Pärt wrote Collage über B-A-C-H for oboe, string orchestra, harpsichord and piano, the first collage work in Estonian music; its three movements carry Baroque names, Toccata, Sarabande and Ricercare. In 1966 the cello concerto Pro et contra and Symphony No. 2 followed. The Arvo Pärt Centre’s biography reads these collages as a confrontation: on one side Pärt’s own twelve-tone writing, which stood for what he has called the ‘unbearable atmosphere of barbed wire’ of modernist music, on the other the Baroque he stylised and quoted, above all Bach, in which he sought beauty and purity. Pärt himself speaks of an abyss between the two. Just before the end of Symphony No. 2 a piano piece from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Sweet Dream, is heard, a simple melody after the dissonance before it.

In 1967 Pärt left the radio and became a freelance composer. On 16 November 1968 Credo was heard in Tallinn: the Estonian Radio Choir, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Mart Lille, conducted by Neeme Järvi. The work opens with the Latin confession of faith. Every new score had to be shown to the Composers’ Union before a premiere. This one slipped through by a chain of coincidences: the Union’s officials were away in Moscow and missed the rehearsal, the official hearing came three months later, nobody understood the Latin, and Järvi did not fear the consequences. After tumultuous applause the piece was played again as an encore.

A confession of faith sung in Latin was an affront to the authorities of an officially atheist state. Credo was banned in the Soviet Union shortly after the premiere and vanished from concert programmes for years. Pärt’s first overtly sacred piece became a turning point. When it was finished he had concluded that his means so far were exhausted. The crisis years 1968–1976 began: a final renunciation of modernist techniques and a search for a language of his own. He spent years studying Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school and Renaissance polyphony. Only Symphony No. 3 (1971), dedicated to Neeme Järvi, briefly broke the pause. Khrennikov himself had tried twelve-tone technique by the early 1970s.

Arvo Pärt Centre: Ground zero. Nekrolog · Arvo Pärt Centre: Credo and white keys music · Arvo Pärt Centre: biography · Arvo Pärt Centre: film evenings 2025 · Samuel Foxon: Arvo Pärt’s music and its reception in the Soviet state 1960–1976 · Arvo Pärt Centre: Collage über B-A-C-H · Arvo Pärt Centre: Symphony No. 2 · Arvo Pärt Centre: Credo · Wikipedia: Arvo Pärt

By the time Credo was finished in 1968, Pärt had concluded that the means he had used so far were exhausted for him. Twelve-tone technique and collage had given what they had to give. Neeme Järvi conducted the premiere of Credo in Tallinn on 16 November 1968; the Latin confession of faith caused a scandal, and the work vanished from concert programmes for years. Then the composer went quiet. The Arvo Pärt Centre calls 1968 to 1976 his period of crisis: a final renunciation of modernist techniques, a search for a personal musical language and, as a result, a radical change of style. The search lasted eight years.

The silence was not empty. Pärt turned to early music and spent years absorbed in Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school and Renaissance polyphony. There he found his models, ideal sound combinations and technique. The only work that briefly interrupted the pause was Symphony No. 3 (1971). It is dedicated to Neeme Järvi, who conducted the premiere in September 1972. The interest in monody and early polyphony is clearly audible in the symphony. The collage works had set two kinds of music against each other; here both the harmony and the melodic material recall choral music of the 14th and 15th centuries, though the composer uses no quotations.

Life changed too. In 1972 Pärt married Nora, and that year he converted from Lutheranism to the Orthodox Church. Nora came into his life in a difficult period; music bound them, and even more a shared, deep and serious interest in the spiritual. An ERR archive programme is titled ‘Nora Pärt helped her husband overcome a creative crisis through art’. In 2003 it was Nora who put the tintinnabuli idea into a formula. In 1972 there was no formula yet, only the search. Pärt has said: ‘Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work.’

Für Alina was written in February 1976, the first work in years and the first piece in the tintinnabuli style. In the autumn came the whole set. On 25 October in the main hall of the University of Tartu and on 27 October in the Estonia Concert Hall, Andres Mustonen’s Hortus Musicus gave the first evenings devoted to tintinnabuli, joined in Tallinn by the Tallinn Chamber Choir and soloists. The Tallinn programme held seven new pieces: Calix, Modus, Trivium, Für Alina, If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper, Pari intervallo and In spe; Tartu had heard almost the same programme two days earlier. Für Alina was played on viola da braccio and viola da gamba. The word ‘tintinnabuli’ stood in the programme for the first time.

The name comes from the Latin tintinnabulum, a little bell. Two voices: the melodic voice moves mostly in steps along the scale, around one central note. The tintinnabuli voice uses only the three notes of the triad and follows the melody by a strict rule, such as always the nearest triad note above. Paul Hillier hears plainchant in the stepwise melody and early polyphonic chant settings in the texture the two voices make. In 2003 Nora Pärt put it as an equation, 1+1=1: melody plus the bell-like triad equals one unified sound. Pärt has said: ‘I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.’

The doors opened. Benjamin Britten died in December 1976; Pärt mourned him with Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a canon for string orchestra and bell, premiered in Tallinn by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Eri Klas on 7 April 1977. The same year brought Fratres for Hortus Musicus, first played in Riga. On 30 September 1977, at the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute, came Tabula rasa, a double concerto for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano: Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko as soloists, the chamber orchestra of the Estonia theatre under Eri Klas. Its two movements are Ludus and Silentium. Kremer has called the work a declaration of silence and admitted that it changed his life.

Arvo Pärt Centre: biography · Arvo Pärt Centre: Symphony No. 3 and going to the other side · Arvo Pärt Centre: the cradle of tintinnabuli (1976) · Klassikaraadio: Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli evening of 1976 · The Conversation: Sacred texts and little bells · ERR archive: Nora Pärt helped her husband through a creative crisis with art · Wikiquote: Arvo Pärt

In January 1980 Arvo Pärt boarded a train with Nora and their two small sons. It was not a free departure: the Arvo Pärt Centre’s biography says he was forced to emigrate, after years in which his music had set him against Soviet officials. Ian Thomson, writing in Prospect, has the train leave Tallinn in heavy snow. At Brest, the last Soviet station before the Polish border, border police stopped the family and went through the luggage: scores, records, cassette tapes. Spiegel im Spiegel, written in 1978, was one of the last pieces from before the departure.

At the station in Vienna a representative of the publisher Universal Edition was waiting for the train. Pärt himself did not know it. Alfred Schlee, the publisher’s long-time head, received the then little-known composer and signed him; in the 1980s Universal Edition became Pärt’s main publisher. The Republic of Austria granted the man who had left as persona non grata citizenship on recommendation, by an accelerated procedure, and he has held it ever since. That same year the Salzburg Festival heard the first performance of Fratres in a version for violin and piano, commissioned by the festival and played by Gidon and Jelena Kremer, to whom it is dedicated.

In 1981 a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) took the family to West Berlin, to Lankwitz in the south-west of the city. Berlin remained home for almost thirty years. The great sacred works belong to those years: Passio (1982), Te Deum (1985), Miserere (1989/92). Works based on liturgical texts and prayers make up the majority of his output. Told by an interviewer in 1988 that he was quite creative, he answered that there are millions of composers so creative that one is afraid of it; what matters is the capability to select.

The breakthrough came over the radio. Manfred Eicher, founder of the label ECM, heard Tabula rasa on a late-night drive, not knowing the composer’s name or the piece’s title. He had to stop the car to listen. Out of that came ECM New Series in 1984, the label’s branch for composers; its first record, Tabula rasa (ECM 1275), appeared on vinyl that autumn with Gidon Kremer, Tatjana Grindenko, Keith Jarrett and Alfred Schnittke, who had played the prepared piano at the 1977 premiere. It brought Pärt wide recognition. Every first recording of his major works since has been made for ECM; the collaboration between Eicher and Pärt has produced more than twenty albums.

The Hilliard Ensemble recorded Passio under Paul Hillier in March 1988 in London, an unbroken span of about 70 minutes. Ties with home began to return before independence: in 1989 the Estonian Academy of Music gave him an honorary doctorate while he was still living in West Berlin. After Estonia regained independence in 1991 the family’s ties with its musical life were restored. In January 1993 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under Tõnu Kaljuste recorded Te Deum for ECM, the first of the Kaljuste albums. Kanon pokajanen took over two years to write; the choir first sang it on 17 March 1998 at the concert for Cologne Cathedral’s 750th anniversary. The work is dedicated to Kaljuste.

The way back began with the archive. In 2007 his son Michael Pärt began bringing the legacy from Berlin to Estonia; the archive moved in 2009. Since 2010 Arvo Pärt has lived permanently in Estonia. That year, at Arvo and Nora Pärt’s prompting, the Arvo Pärt Centre was founded at Laulasmaa, to preserve and interpret the composer’s work in an Estonian-language setting. At first it worked out of a private house called Aliina near Heliküla. Laulasmaa was chosen for a reason: its pine forests and sandy beach were familiar to Arvo and Nora from their youth, and his teacher and friend Heino Eller had once lived there. In October 2018 the Centre’s new building opened in the pine forest, the composer’s personal archive.

Arvo Pärt Centre: biography · Arvo Pärt Centre: timeline · ECM Records: Arvo Pärt · Ian Thomson, Prospect (2022): Arvo Pärt, let there be delight · Universal Edition: the Alfred Schlee era · Arvo Pärt Centre: ECM is home to Arvo Pärt’s music · Martin Elste: an interview with Arvo Pärt (Fanfare, 1988), Arvo Pärt Centre · German Wikipedia: Arvo Pärt · Arvo Pärt Centre: Spiegel im Spiegel · IRCAM: Arvo Pärt, biography