Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935; ) is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from Gregorian chant.

Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. A prolonged struggle with Soviet officials led him to emigrate with his wife and their two sons in 1980. He lived first in Vienna, Austria, where he took Austrian citizenship, and then re-located to Berlin, Germany. He returned to Estonia around the turn of the 21st century and now lives in Tallinn.

Musical development

Pärt is often identified with the school of minimalism and, more specifically, that of mystic minimalism or holy minimalism. He is considered a pioneer of the latter style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener. Although his fame initially rested on instrumental works such as ''Tabula Rasa'' and ''Spiegel im Spiegel'', his choral works have also come to be widely appreciated.

Pärt's musical education began at age seven. He began attending music school in Rakvere, where his family lived. By the time he reached his early teen years, Pärt was writing his own compositions. While studying composition with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, it was said of him that "he just seemed to shake his sleeves and notes would fall out."

In this period of Estonian history, Pärt was unable to encounter many musical influences from outside the Soviet Union except for a few illegal tapes and scores. Although Estonia had been an independent Baltic state at the time of Pärt's birth, the Soviet Union occupied it in 1940 as a result of the Soviet-Nazi Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; and the country would then remain under Soviet domination—except for the three-year period of German wartime occupation—for the next 51 years.

Musical oeuvre

The spirit of early European polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional Third Symphony (1971); and thereafter, he immersed himself in early music, re-investigating the roots of Western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant, and the emergence of polyphony in the European Renaissance.

The music that began to emerge after this period was radically different. This period of new compositions included ''Fratres'', ''Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten'', and ''Tabula Rasa.'' Pärt describes the music of this period as tintinnabuli—like the ringing of bells. ''Spiegel im Spiegel'' (1978) is a well-known example which has been used in many films. The music is characterised by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triads, which form the basis of Western harmony. These are reminiscent of ringing bells. Tintinnabuli works are rhythmically simple and do not change tempo. Another characteristic of Pärt's later works is that they are frequently settings for sacred texts, although he mostly chooses Latin or the Church Slavonic language used in Orthodox liturgy instead of his native Estonian language. Large-scale works inspired by religious texts include ''St. John Passion'', ''Te Deum'', and ''Litany''. Choral works from this period include ''''Magnificat'''' and ''The Beatitudes''.

Of his popularity, Steve Reich has written: "Even in Estonia, Arvo was getting the same feeling that we were all getting .... I love his music, and I love the fact that he is such a brave, talented man .... He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion." Pärt's music came to public attention in the West, largely thanks to Manfred Eicher who recorded several of Pärt's compositions for ECM Records starting in 1984.

Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 15th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2005 in four concerts. Chamber music included ''Für Alina'' for piano, played by himself, ''Spiegel im Spiegel'' and ''Psalom'' for string quartet. The chamber orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra played his ''Trisagion'', ''Fratres'' and ''Cantus'' along with works of Bach. The Windsbach Boys Choir and soloists Sibylla Rubens, Ingeborg Danz, Markus Schäfer and Klaus Mertens performed ''Magnificat'' and ''Collage über B-A-C-H'' together with two cantatas of Bach and one of Mendelssohn. The Hilliard Ensemble, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, the Rostocker Motettenchor and the Hilliard instrumental ensemble, conducted by Markus Johannes Langer, performed a program of Pärt's organ music and works for voices (some a cappella), including ''Pari Intervallo'', ''De profundis'' and ''Miserere''.

A new composition, ''Für Lennart'', written for the memory of the Estonian President Lennart Meri, was played at his funeral service on 2 April 2006.

In response to the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on 7 October 2006, Pärt declared that all his works performed in 2006–2007 would be in honour of her death: :''"Anna Politkovskaya staked her entire talent, energy and—in the end—even her life on saving people who had become victims of the abuses prevailing in Russia."''— Arvo Pärt

Pärt was honoured as the featured composer of the 2008 RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin, Ireland. He was also commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society to compose a new choral work based on St. Patricks Breastplate, which premiered in 2008 in Louth, Ireland. The new work is called ''The Deers Cry.'' This is the composer's first Irish commission, having its debut in Drogheda and Dundalk in February 2008.

His recent (2008) ''Symphony No. 4'' is named “Los Angeles” and was dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It is Pärt's first symphony written in over 37 years, since 1971's ''Symphony No. 3''. It premiered in Los Angeles, California, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on 10 January 2009, and has been nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Selected works

Awards

International Arvo Pärt Centre

References

Sources

External links

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People

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See also

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work ''A Boy Was Born'' in 1934. With the premiere of his opera ''Peter Grimes'' in 1945, he leapt to international fame. For the next fifteen years he devoted much of his compositional attention to writing operas, establishing him as one of the leading 20th century figures in this genre. Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging; he produced important music in such varied genres as orchestral, choral, solo vocal (much of it written for the tenor Peter Pears), chamber and instrumental, as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, and was a fine pianist and conductor.

Life

Britten heard Frank Bridge’s orchestral poem ''The Sea'' at a festival and was, as he put it, ‘knocked sideways’. Alston was a family friend of Frank Bridge and was able to arrange an introduction. After examining Britten's work, Bridge took him on as a composition pupil, and the first lesson took place on 10 January 1928, a few weeks after Britten's 14th birthday. One of the first pieces composed during the period of Bridge's tutelage was the ''Quatre Chansons françaises'' for soprano and orchestra, though it appears that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught rather than learned from Bridge.

He later studied, 1930–33, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland (composition) and Arthur Benjamin (piano). Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Mahler, and Dmitry Shostakovich. Although ultimately dissuaded by his parents (at the suggestion of College staff), Britten had also intended postgraduate study with Alban Berg in Vienna.

Britten was a prolific juvenile composer: some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention were the ''Sinfonietta'' Op. 1, ''A Hymn to the Virgin'' (1930) and a set of choral variations ''A Boy was Born'', written in 1934 for the BBC Singers. In this same period he wrote ''Friday Afternoons'', a collection of 14 songs mostly for unison singing, for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn where Britten's brother, Robert, was headmaster.

Early professional life

Of more lasting importance to Britten was his meeting in 1937 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his life partner. In the same year he composed a ''Pacifist March'' (words, Ronald Duncan) for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member, but the work was not a success and soon withdrawn. One of Britten's most noteworthy works from the 1930s was ''Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge'' for string orchestra, Op. 10, written in 1937.

In early 1939, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America. There, in 1940, Britten composed ''Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo'', the first of many song cycles for Pears. Already friends with the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works ''Billy the Kid'' and ''An Outdoor Overture'', both of which manifestly influenced his own music. While in America Britten wrote his first music drama, ''Paul Bunyan'', an operetta (to a libretto by Auden). The period in America was also remarkable for a number of orchestral works, including the ''Violin Concerto'' Op. 15, and ''Sinfonia da Requiem'' Op. 20 (for full orchestra).

In the meantime, Britten had had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music through the transcriptions for two pianos made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. Britten first met McPhee at Stanton Cottage in the summer of 1939, and the two subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording. This musical encounter was to bear fruit decades later in several Balinese-inspired works including ''The Prince of the Pagodas'', ''Noye's Fludde'' and ''Death in Venice''.

Return to England

''Peter Grimes'' was the first in a series of English operas, of which ''Billy Budd'' (1951) and ''The Turn of the Screw'' (1954) were particularly admired. His Shakespeare opera, ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', followed in 1960. These operas share common themes. Even in his comic opera ''Albert Herring'' of 1947, all feature an 'outsider' character excluded or misunderstood by society. Often this is the eponymous protagonist, as in ''Peter Grimes'' and ''Owen Wingrave''.

Britten was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the Coronation Honours, 1953.

An increasingly important influence was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour with Pears in 1957, when Britten was struck by the music of the Balinese gamelan and by Japanese Noh plays. The fruits of this tour include the ballet ''The Prince of the Pagodas'' (1957) and the series of semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": ''Curlew River'' (1964), ''The Burning Fiery Furnace'' (1966) and ''The Prodigal Son'' (1968). The greatest success of Britten's career was, however, the ''War Requiem'', written for the 1962 consecration of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral.

Britten developed close friendships with Russian musicians Dmitri Shostakovich and Mstislav Rostropovich in the 1960s. He composed his ''Cello Suites'', ''Cello Symphony'' and ''Cello Sonata'' for Mstislav Rostropovich, and conducted the first Western performance of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. Shostakovich dedicated this score to Britten, and often spoke very highly of his music. Britten himself had previously dedicated ''The Prodigal Son'' (the third and last of the 'Church Parables') to Shostakovich. He was honoured again by appointment to the Order of Merit (OM) on 23 March 1965.

In his last decade, Britten's health deteriorated, and his later works became more and more sparse in texture. They include the operas ''Owen Wingrave'' (1970) and ''Death in Venice'' (1971–1973), the ''Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was"'' (1974) and ''Third String Quartet'' (1975)— which drew on material from ''Death in Venice''— as well as the dramatic cantata ''Phaedra'' (1975), written for Janet Baker.

Having previously declined a knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage on 2 July 1976 as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. A few months later he died of heart failure at his house in Aldeburgh. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul's Church there, with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone. The grave of his partner, Sir Peter Pears, lies next to his, and near to that of Imogen Holst, a close friend. A memorial stone to him was unveiled in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1978.

The Red House in Aldeburgh, where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lived and worked together for almost thirty years, is now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation established to promote their musical legacy.

Music

Operas

One of Britten's best known works is ''The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra'' (1946), which was composed to accompany ''Instruments of the Orchestra'', an educational film produced by the British government, narrated and conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Its subtitle is ''Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell''; the theme is a melody from Henry Purcell's ''Abdelazar''. Britten gives individual variations to each of the sections of the orchestra, starting with the woodwind, then the string instruments, the brass instruments and finally the percussion. Britten then brings the whole orchestra together again in a fugue before restating the theme to close the work. The original film's spoken commentary is often omitted in concert performances and recordings.

Britten's church music is also considerable: it contains frequently performed 'classics' such as ''Rejoice in the Lamb'', composed for St Matthew's Northampton (where the Vicar was Revd Walter Hussey), as well as ''A Hymn to the Virgin'', and ''Missa Brevis'' for boys' voices and organ.

As a conductor, Britten performed the music of many composers, as well as his own. Among his celebrated recordings are versions of Mozart's 40th Symphony and Elgar's ''The Dream of Gerontius'' (with Pears as Gerontius), and an album of works by Grainger in which Britten features as pianist as well as conductor.

''Nocturnal after John Dowland'' for guitar (1963) has an indisputably central place in the repertoire of its instrument. This work is typically spare in his late style, and shows the depth of his lifelong admiration for Elizabethan lute songs. In each of the eight variations Britten focuses on a different feature of the work's theme, Dowland's song ''Come, Heavy Sleep'', or its lute accompaniment, before the theme emerges complete at the close of the work.

In 2005, the Britten-Pears Foundation in partnership with the University of East Anglia was awarded funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to produce a thematic catalogue of Britten's works. The project is distinguished by being the first composer thematic catalogue to be published initially online. (All previous thematic catalogues have been print publications, though some have been published online later.) The work involves gathering and cataloguing manuscript and published notation and published recordings, producing a chronology, and assigning identifiers to Britten's works. These identifiers are in addition to Britten's own opus numbers and, after the style of preceding thematic catalogues such as BWV for J.S. Bach, comprise the letters 'BTC' followed by numbers assigned in chronological order. The catalogue includes numerous unpublished works and is expected, when completed in 2013, to include around 1,200 works. (Britten's ''published'' output includes around 200 works, of which 95 were assigned opus numbers.)

Reputation

Early in his career, Britten made a conscious effort to set himself apart from the English musical mainstream, which he regarded as complacent, insular and amateurish. Many contemporary critics distrusted his facility, cosmopolitanism and admiration for composers such as Mahler, Berg, and Stravinsky, not at the time considered appropriate models for a young English musician.

Britten's status as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century is now secure among professional critics. However, criticism of his music is apt to become entangled with consideration of his personality, his politics (especially his pacifism in World War II) and his sexuality. Humphrey Carpenter's 1992 biography further described Britten's often fraught social, professional and sexual relationships, as did Alan Bennett's 2009 play ''The Habit of Art'', set while Britten is composing the opera ''Death in Venice'' and centred on a fictional meeting between Britten and W. H. Auden (Britten was played in the premiere production by Alex Jennings).

In 2003, a selection of Britten's writings, edited by Paul Kildea, revealed other ways that he addressed such issues as his pacifism. A further study along the lines begun by Carpenter is John Bridcut's ''Britten's Children'', 2006, which describes Britten’s infatuation with a series of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys throughout his life, most notably David Hemmings.

For many musicians, however, Britten's technique, broad musical and human sympathies and ability to treat the most traditional of musical forms with freshness and originality place him at the head of composers of his generation. A notable tribute is ''Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten'', an orchestral piece written in 1977 by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Awards

Recordings by Britten

See also

References

Sources

External links

Biographies and profiles

Portraits

Worklists and performances

Interpretations

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