The music of Arvo Pärt: from fierce dissonance to euphonious bell sounds
Which titles spring to mind on hearing the name of Arvo Pärt? Sonatina opus 1; Symphony no. 1; Perpetuum mobile, or Fratres; Für Alina; Spiegel im Spiegel? My guess is the second series, for in the nineties Pärt conquered the world with pieces like these. The audience flocked in droves to immerse themselves in his euphonious sound world, though critics deprecatingly dubbed this a ‘warm tub’, full of new-age kitsch. Nowadays Pärt is one of the most performed living composers, but his road to so called ‘new simplicity’ was long and bumpy.
Arvo Pärt (Paide, Estonia 1935) grew up in a dictatorship: in 1944, during the Second World War, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union. For years a strong and intolerant wind blew, especially in the field of the arts. In 1948, barely three years after the victory over the Nazis and their brutal persecution of so-called “entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) great composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were publicly pilloried for their “formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies”. In such a climate there was little room for experimentation.
Pärt studied composition at the Conservatory of Tallin, where he was trained in the standard classical style. The atonal music of modernists such as Arnold Schönberg was taboo. Pärt’s earliest pieces…
