At Heart of Arvo Pärt’s Works, Eastern Orthodox Christianity - The New York Times 2019-09-24 09:09

His Music, Entwined With His Faith

By William Robin May 16, 2014

The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 2001.Roberto Masotti

“Religion guides all the processes in our lives, without us even knowing it,” the
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt said in a recent phone interview. “It is true that
religion has a very important role in my composition, but how it really works, I
am not able to describe.”

Mr. Pärt, 78, is a practicing Eastern Orthodox Christian, which is frequently

mentioned but often left unexplored. Critics and fans compare his contemplative,
austere music to the painted icons central to Eastern Orthodoxy, but rarely delve
into those connections in great detail.

Filling in these gaps is one of the goals of the Arvo Pärt Project, which will bring
the composer to New York for the first time in 30 years for a series of

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performances in New York and Washington. The New York events include an all-
Pärt program at Carnegie Hall on May 31, featuring the Estonian Philharmonic
Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra; on June 2, his choral cycle
“Kanon Pokajanen” will be staged in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of
Dendur. The project — which will also include panel events and academic
collaborations — is sponsored by St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
in Yonkers.

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It’s the perfect match: a major Orthodox cultural figure celebrated by a pre-
eminent Orthodox institution. But the Arvo Pärt Project also opens up a more
complicated issue: What does it mean to speak specifically about the religion of a
composer whose music’s spirituality has been interpreted so broadly for so long?

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Mr. Pärt with his composition professor Heino Eller, in the early 1960s at Tallinn Conservatory.Arvo Pärt Center

“There’s this kind of universally accessible spirituality going on, and yet it
evidently has some particular sources in the context that he locates his own prayer
life,” said Peter Bouteneff, a professor of theology at the seminary. “It’s where he
goes to church, it’s the texts that he reads, the ancient Greek fathers,” he added.
“This is what feeds his soul, and therefore: Is there some connection between this
universally perceived and universally accessible spirituality, and the particular
foundations in Eastern Orthodoxy?”

It is a question that Mr. Pärt is not quite comfortable answering, though he will
receive an honorary doctorate from the seminary. When asked about the religious
content of his music, he responded: “I am actually writing music for myself, based

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At Heart of Arvo Pärt’s Works, Eastern Orthodox Christianity - The New York Times 2019-09-24 09:09

on my own cognition. Because of that, it reflects values that are important to me.”

“If the listener also perceives what I felt while composing, I am very happy about
it,” he added. “I am not taking the task in my music to discuss some religious or
special Orthodox values. I am trying to reflect the values in my music that could
touch every individual, every person.”

Mr. Pärt’s fervor did not always work in his favor. He first made waves in the
Estonian compositional world for “Nekrolog,” an orchestral work critiqued by
Soviet censors for its 12-tone language. The 1968 premiere of “Credo,” his first
overtly sacred piece, drew further negative attention. This time, it was not the
music but the title that irritated the authorities: The religious message was
interpreted as an act of political dissidence. (The music theorist Yuri Kholopov
once remarked that “God and Jesus Christ were bigger enemies to the Soviet
regime than Boulez or Webern.”)

Mr. Pärt, in 2011.Eric Marinitsch

Mr. Pärt was unofficially censured, his music disappearing from concert halls. In a
radio interview the year of the “Credo” premiere, he attempted to voice his beliefs
publicly. Questioned about his main influences, Mr. Pärt responded: “Of course,
Christ. Because he solved his fraction perfectly, godly.” The section was edited
out of the broadcast version, to avoid a government ban.

Following the “Credo” controversy, Mr. Pärt fell mostly silent. He converted to
Orthodox Christianity in 1972 upon marrying his second wife, Nora. When he re-
emerged in 1976, it was with the crystalline stillness of “Für Alina,” the first
composition shaped by his tintinnabuli technique: a weaving-together of melodic
lines in which one voice outlines a chord while the other circles around it.

It would be easy to view Mr. Pärt’s compositional arc as unique to his personal
vision, but it was also in line with an international exodus from serialism that
began in the mid-’60s, looking inward and backward. He pored over the writings
of the early church, and immersed himself in medieval chant and Renaissance

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polyphony. The sparse, gothic music for which he is known emerged out of that
period of study. Today, “Für Alina” and its complement “Spiegel im Spiegel” —
ubiquitous from film soundtracks and as accompaniment for modern dancers —
represent études in Minimalist technique that point toward more promising
developments.

Tintinnabuli comes to fruition in Mr. Pärt’s masterful choral works, including the
1997 “Kanon Pokajanen.” But it is music that also presents a conundrum for the
secular listener, one who might seek out the spirituality of classical music at large
rather than that of the Orthodox church.

Mr. Pärt with the conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, center, and the sound engineers Peter Laenger, left, and Stephan
Schellmann, right, during a 2011 recording session.Kaupo Kikkas/Arvo Pärt Center

These works are rhetorically charged, their most effective musical moments
matched to the message of their sacred creeds. Mr. Pärt once wrote of the “Kanon
Pokajanen”: “I tried to use language as a point of departure. I wanted the word to
be able to find its own sound, to draw its own melodic line. Somewhat to my
surprise, the resulting music is entirely immersed in the particular character of
Church Slavonic, a language used exclusively in ecclesiastical texts.” The
exactitude with which Mr. Pärt sets the text is consistent with Orthodox theology,
which stresses the reciprocity between beauty and truth.

Historical distance has tempered the explicit Lutheran message of Bach’s cantatas
or the Roman Catholicism of Palestrina’s Masses. Disregarding the scriptural
details of Mr. Pärt’s music, though, might mean ignoring an aspect integral to a
living composer, even if he is vague about it.

The perspective also follows a trajectory of thinking about Mr. Pärt that dates back
to the 1984 album “Tabula Rasa,” which started his collaboration with the ECM
label and its producer Manfred Eicher. The elegantly wrought abstract spirituality
of those records has helped position Mr. Pärt as a composer for all faiths. The
global classical music market has mediated — or perhaps tamed — his religion,
opening up the iconography of the Orthodox church to a broader mysticism.

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It is that tension that the Arvo Pärt Project will explore. “Some of the classic
things that are observed about Pärt, and even expressed by him, are these utterly
universal human realities, like the interplay between suffering and consolation,”
Dr. Bouteneff said. “That’s the whole logic of tintinnabuli as well, that you have
the melody voice, which is the human straying, and the triad voice, which
represents the divine stability and consolation.”

Mr. Kaljuste with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Vox Clamantis ensemble and the Borusan Istanbul
Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance in Istanbul.Mahmut Ceylan

But there are narrower implications for Orthodoxy that Dr. Bouteneff said he
hopes the project will address. “What has our liturgical tradition done with that
dynamic? And how might that feed into what Pärt is doing?” he asked.

This dichotomy is particularly evident in Mr. Pärt’s 2009 “Adam’s Lament,” his
most recent large-scale work and the centerpiece of the Carnegie concert. In a
program note, Mr. Pärt described Adam as a “collective term which comprises
humankind in its entirety and each individual person alike, irrespective of time,
epochs, social strata and confession.”

But embedded within these universalities are the particularities of an Orthodox

tradition. “Adam’s Lament” sets text in ecclesiastical Slavic, written by the
Russian monk St. Silouan. Mr. Pärt wrote, “I wanted to remain as close as possible
to Silouan’s words and, as far as I could, to entrust myself with them, to
internalize them.” The music, bleak and majestic, is far from the placid sound
world of “Für Alina.” Toward the end, the chorus takes on a declamatory tone,
singing in a menacing unison as it describes Adam’s sorrow: “Only the soul that
has come to know the Lord and the magnitude of his love for us can understand.”

In recent years, Mr. Pärt has castigated the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin,
dedicating his Fourth Symphony, of 2008, to the imprisoned Russian oligarch
Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Asked about the current crisis in Ukraine — which
threatens to spill into Estonia — he said, “I am very critical of Putin’s government
and absolutely shocked about the latest event in Ukraine.”

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Mr. Pärt said that Mr. Putin “spread around him massive amounts of hostility and
aggression, which has its own dynamics and can now only grow. You cannot take
it back anymore. There is no control over it today. It cannot be called anything
else but a crime. It is more than a crime.”

But, just as he hesitates to link religion and art, Mr. Pärt shies away from an
overtly political interpretation of his music. “I have never participated in political
art,” he said. “My compositions have never been political, even the
‘Khodorkovsky’ Symphony has really nothing to do with politics. It is written on
text of prayers.”

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