A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Arvo Pärt
This might seem a bizarre choice, after all the great composers I have written about over the last months, since Arvo has not written any operas, and very little for solo voice, and yet, I think he has had a profound influence on vocal music of the late 20th century and early 21st century.
He was born in Estonia in 1935 and lived through the cruel times of the Second World War. During his childhood, he showed an interest in music, but was hampered by a piano which only had top and bottom notes, as the mid-range was damaged. I’d love to imagine that this was influential for his mature compositional style, but his early work was avant-garde and atonal, and so I don’t think a dodgy piano made any difference! He found it difficult to work within the stifling Soviet system but began to make a name for himself as a tyro of modernism and, in 1968, he wrote his first overtly religious work, Credo. This was a sort of epiphany for him, as he was clearly struggling with his own music and his own spiritual beliefs. The authorities were quick to suppress any form of religious music, and he found himself shunned and officially censured.
Pärt then stopped composing and left his job as a sound producer for Eesti Raadio, the state controlled public radio. He began to study mediaeval and Renaissance music, and Gregorian chant, and in 1972, converted from Lutheran Christianity to Russian Orthodox, with its wealth of choral tradition. In 1976, he re-emerged with his new style intact, featuring his own special sound, which is described as tintinnabuli, and saw its first expression in his piano piece that year, ‘Für Alina’ which was premiered at a concert in Tallinn, the name clearly echoing Beethoven’s famous ‘Für Elise’. In 1977, he wrote his “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten” for string orchestra and bell, which is a hauntingly beautiful piece, simple and yet profound, written as an elegy to Britten, who had died the previous year. Britten was much admired by the Estonian composer, who valued his “unusual purity” of writing, and who felt a close spiritual connection with the English genius.
My first acquaintance with the music of Arvo Pärt occurred in the late 1980s. I had met the counter-tenor David James at Scottish Opera earlier in the decade, and worked again with him at ENO in Reimann’s ‘Lear’, a modern dissonant take on the Shakespeare play which had premiered recently in Germany with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role. David and I were both engaged to understudy Edgar and Gloucester, son and father. Although David was a little older than me, and much slighter physically, at one moment in the production, Edgar has to carry his father offstage. This necessitated a feat of strength and heroism on David’s part which allowed us to form a bond for the rest of our lives. Since his main job at that time, and for decades to follow, was as principal counter-tenor in the world-renowned Hilliard Ensemble, he invited me to a performance, in a large church in Chelsea, of the St John Passion written in 1982 by Arvo Part in Latin. The Hilliards had recorded the work in 1988, and, although not written for them, had made it their own, to the extent that Pärt was so delighted with their performance that he wrote several further pieces for them.
That concert in Chelsea was one of the most important events in my life, as I fell in love with the piece, and found myself quite mesmerised by its austere beauty. It is written for minimal resources: an Evangelist quartet of soprano, alto, tenor and baritone, singing the words of St John, accompanied by solo oboe, violin, cello and bassoon; Pilate (tenor) and Jesus (bass) accompanied by organ, and a mixed chorus (S A T B). It lasts about 70 minutes, rarely changes rhythm, and only changes key twice until, at the very end, it blazes out in D Major, to climactic effect. I used the word “mesmerised” with good reason, as it progresses slowly and almost dreamily for nearly all its length. The quartet interchange with each other, sometimes singing alone, sometimes one voice holds on longer than the others, sometimes all 8 musicians play and sing together. There is a very clear system followed by Pärt in the writing. Christus sings the longest and slowest notes, and stays within one octave, A to A, apart from one B natural, while Pilate sings in a slightly faster tempo, covering more notes and shifting around (shifty notes to depict a shifty character). Both are accompanied only by organ. ‘Passio’ is a tour de force of composition, and the release on the very last chord, on the very last word, “Amen”, is incredibly moving. Utter simplicity, and yet utter profundity!
After hearing that concert in Chelsea, with the estimable Michael George singing Christus, as he did on the recording (ECM 1988), I knew I had to sing in this piece. I managed to make it clear around London that I was open to singing it and was engaged to sing it in semi-professional concert soon afterwards. Thrilled with that, I thought it might come up again sometime, and was delighted when, in the early 90s, I got a phone call from my agent, wondering if I would be available to sing Christus in ‘Passio’ with the Hilliard Ensemble in Northern Italy that summer. My wife and I had booked a holiday in Czechoslovakia and Hungary that year, but we were able to re-arrange things to allow us to go from Lake Balaton in Hungary to Bolzano (Bozen) and Trento, for the concerts. Two days of rehearsal were fitted into the schedule, and so we set off on our holiday in our swanky new Audi.
It proved to be an unforgettable holiday, as those two countries were just emerging from decades of Communist rule, and were a fascinating historical throwback to a simpler, less commercial time. Driving through Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, we were able to see a lifestyle that had been lost in the west, societies which had not changed much in 40 years. With little freedom of movement, local populations had tended to remain constant, so we were able to observe whole cultural and ethnic differences often from town to town. A village of dark haired and darker skinned people would give way to a village of blond people! It was fascinating! Further east through Hungary, we were able to observe a largely agrarian society and finally, in Tokaj, we found the great vineyards which had supplied sweet wine to Emperors and Kings over the centuries, cultivated manually and transported by horse and cart. Returning westwards, and after stopping in Eger, the ancient town famed for its Bull’s Blood red wine (Egri Bikaver), we reached the shores of Lake Balaton, known in German as Plattensee, the shallow lake. This sun-kissed area, formerly a playground for the wealthy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was beginning to emerge as a tourist centre, firstly for East Europeans, and now for intrepid westerners like ourselves. More wonderful wine was discovered by us, fiery white wine mainly, perfect for accompanying the lake fish and the spicy paprika-rich recipes of central Hungary.
We had calculated that we could get fairly easily to Bolzano in the Italian Dolomites, as the distance didn’t seem too great. However, we had failed to notice that between us and the Hilliards lay some quite high eastern Alps, and so we arrived at our hotel in Bolzano around 3.30 in the morning, totally exhausted. Fortunately, a couple of days rehearsal had been allowed for, and I had learned the music well in advance, so my first two concerts singing ‘Passio’ with the world-famous Hilliard Ensemble were a success. After that, I went on to sing ‘Passio’ with them on numerous occasions, in Sweden, Germany, Norway, Switzerland and Japan, as well as in the UK. My last engagement was in King’s College, Cambridge, singing Christus from the organ gallery in that most miraculous of buildings, with my wife and children in attendance. It doesn’t get much better than that.
On two occasions, Arvo came to performances, once in Stockholm and once in Zürich. I was extremely nervous, but he declared himself pleased with my singing, and I experienced a great sense of pride and relief at the same time. He wrote some more music for the Hilliards, particularly a splendid ‘Miserere’, which I heard on a couple of occasions. Their magnificent ensemble singing was one of the wonders of late 20th and early 21st century music, and I feel privileged to count them as my friends. Indeed, David James sang a poignant plainchant piece ‘Beata Viscera’ by Perotin, for my wife’s 60th birthday in our stairwell, and later that year, he sang the piece that Arvo had written for him for his 50th birthday, a setting of Robert Burns’ poem, ”My Heart’s in the Highlands” at a concert we took part in together at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Since Burns, the people’s poet and an early champion of the rights of man, was a great favourite of the Soviet government in the USSR after the Second World War, most schoolchildren in the Soviet system were taught his poetry, in the original Scots, and learned it by rote, even though they had no idea what each word meant! Arvo, in Soviet Estonia, was well-acquainted with Scotland’s national Bard, and had always loved this poem. So, we have another reason to salute this marvellous composer in the Edinburgh Music Review!
Manfred Eicher, head of ECM Records, has been immensely influential in bringing Pärt’s music to public attention, and, as this record label was the one that the Hilliards used for most of their later career, the combination of Pärt and the Hilliard Ensemble has been an enormous success. Although Paul Hillier was one of the founding members of the group, and is Arvo’s biographer, the Ensemble was actually named after the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. Many years ago, there was an exquisite exhibition of Hilliard’s miniature paintings in Edinburgh, and there is still one in the collection, a portrait of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. The ensemble’s partnership with the Norwegian Jazz saxophonist, Jan Garbarek, has proved to be phenomenally successful, and their first album, ‘Officium’, sold in its thousands. Eicher had both partners on his books and had the brilliant idea of putting them together, the Hilliards singing Mediaeval and Renaissance music while Garbarek improvised round them. They recorded it in the chapel of an old monastery high in the Austrian Alps, and the result was spectacular. They toured it to cathedrals and concert halls round the world, and, as the saxophone improvised, each concert was different!
There are several more choral works written by Pärt, although I’m not sure if anything surpasses ‘Passio’. It’s worth looking for recordings like the ‘Canon Pokajanen’, a work of serene beauty based on an old Church Slavonic prayer to a guardian angel, and ‘Te Deum’.
Pärt has often been written about as minimalist, bracketed with Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener. The last named is often mentioned along with Pärt as so-called Holy Minimalists, although this is far too glib a description. The whole Minimalist movement of the 1980s was a reaction to the ever more Avant-Garde modernism of Classical Music at the time, a trend which was causing many music lovers to fear for their art form’s future, as composers vied with each other to produce music that was more and more cacophonous and, supposedly, “pure”. The jury is still out on the long-term success of this anti-modernist movement, and some of the compositions produced were almost as boring as the Avant Garde was unlistenable to. However, for me, quite a lot of John Adams music, especially his operas, is fine, and I think Arvo Pärt is a genius.
Arvo is honoured as a great hero of Estonia, and now lives, in his 80s, in a beautiful house deep in the forest outside Tallinn, built specially for him by the Estonian state. It is called the Arvo Pärt Centre, and, as well as his home, it houses the Pärt archive, and is used as a sort of training centre and hub for students of his music.
I hope you might explore more of his music after reading this article. It will be worth your while.
