The Choral Compositions of Arvo Pärt As an Example of “God-Seeking” Through Music in Soviet Russia

85

THE CHORAL COMPOSITIONS OF ARVO PÄRT
AS AN EXAMPLE OF “GOD-SEEKING” THROUGH MUSIC IN SOVIET RUSSIA

*
TATIANA SOLOVIOVA

1. EMERGING FROM THE UNDERGROUND OF ‘OFFICIAL ATHEISM’ OF THE SOVIET ERA

Arvo Pärt was a representative of the underground music in the former Soviet Union. His music, like the works of many other musicians and artists, did not fit within the narrow bosom of Socialist Realism – the prevailing ideology of the time.¹He had to struggle in order to write the music he wanted. Nowadays there is no Soviet Empire anymore, and the compositions of Pärt represent “the face” of contemporary music. He is one of the few composers whose art music enjoys success similar to that of pop. He is widely known, and his works are being performed all over the world.
Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 in Paide, near Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, one of the Western republics within the former USSR. Between the First and the Second World War this little country enjoyed a short period of independence. Life for Pärt till 1980 was inseparably connected with his Motherland Estonia on one hand, and with Russia, which was the political and cultural dominant at that time, on the other hand. Pärt knew and loved national traditions, as well as he knew European and Russian culture: he called the composer Glazunov who taught his teacher Heino Eller ‘my musi-

* Tatiana Soloviova studied at Moscow State University and obtained her PhD in History. She currently teaches Russian at the University of Oxford. She is a practicing musician and conducts a church choir, while also studying musicology at the Goldsmiths College, University of London.

1

‘Socialist Realism is a doctrine of artistic creation founded on the truthful, historically valid representation of reality in its revolutionary development…’, according to the Entsiklopedichesky Muzykal’nyi Slovar’ (Encylopedic Music Dictionary) (Moscow, 1966). Works of Socialist Realism should incorporate such qualities as accessibility to masses, optimism, making use of folk traditions of the country, being based on classical traditions,

representing Communist ideology (dostupnost’, optimizm, narodnost, klassitsizm, partiinost’).

86 TATIANA SOLOVIOVA

cal grandfather’, among friends who made a deep influence on him were Andrei Volkonsky and Alfred Schnittke, also musical dissidents. However, his technique of composition and his musical style – when it was formed he called it tintinnabuli (‘little bells’) – remains unique to him and it hardly contains any features of either Russian or Estonian music. Nowadays people speak about instantly recognisable “Pärtian” music. The main feature of his music written after 1972 – after the crisis that clearly divides his music career into “before” and “after” – is its religious, openly Christian theme.
At the time of the Soviet Empire all people loyal to the regime had to share the official belief that ‘there is no God’. From oktyabryonoks and pioneers (children from 7 to 14) to komsomol (Communist Unity of Young People) and the Party members, everyone had to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime and to vow ‘to fight religious prejudices’. The degree and scope of official anti-religious propaganda can hardly be exaggerated and can hardly be imagined by those who did not live through that time.
There were “guards” at the entrances to churches turning away young people who came there on days like Christmas and Easter. And if they had been noticed and reported, their Komsomol career was jeopardised. Bell ringing, because of its religious associations, was nearly banned. Even in children’s fairy tales such as Kornei Chukovsky’s ‘Oh, my God! What has happened?’ (Bozhe moi! Chto sluchilos’?) the title had to be changed into ‘What is this? What has happened?’. All artists were subjected to most vigorous censorship and any hints of religion were removed.
Religious beliefs, being intrinsically anti-Communist, were deemed as bad as political opposition to the regime. Expressing religious views – “religious propaganda” – was equalled to a criminal offence and punished by various means. Under Stalin, it most often incurred the death penalty or decades in concentration camps. During Khrushchov’s “thaw” and Brezhnev’s “stagnation” periods it could have been imprisonment, psychiatric clinic or deprivation of all deserved rewards and financial hardships. “The thaw” seems to be a much milder period of Soviet history – truly so, but not as far religion is concerned. Under Khrushchov more churches were destroyed than in any other period of Russian history; in 1961 he announced on television that in 1980 he would show the world the last priest in Russia. Historians now acknowledge that at no other time the Christian Church has been persecuted to such an extent as in Soviet Russia.

87

Yet, communist ideology left a terrible lacuna in people’s souls; only a few could satisfy themselves with Communist ideals; many suffered spiritual hunger. Many tried to discover inner meaning of life through art. Concert halls were deemed by many as temples. One can remember the famous tenor Kozlovsky who prayed and bowed near Bolshoi Theatre – for him and many others it was the Temple. During the Great Patriotic War concert performances of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony reminded contemporaries of ‘religious rites that helped to let out hidden thoughts and suffering gained for many years’.²‘The music was nothing less than an exalted liturgy…’, as was said of the Thirteenth Symphony of Shostakovich in 1962.³
Openly Christian art like that chosen by Pärt and some others was a very risky path and could ruin any career. But those who are born to seek cannot be stopped. For many religion represented conscience, morality and connection with the past.⁴Pärt’s way to religion, to Christianity and later to Eastern Orthodoxy was long and wavy. In 1972, at the age of thirty-seven, he finished his “God-seeking” journey and joined the Russian Orthodox Church, which has remained his spiritual home.

2. B^{EFORE THE}CRISIS: THE AVANT-GARDE COMPOSITIONS OF 1958-1968

Pärt’s first compositions were in the modernist style, following the path opened to Soviet composers by Andrei Volkonsky. At that time Pärt did not have any interest in early music, he thought of it as irksome. His teacher Eller recognised this and gave his student a special tuition so that Pärt could pass his exam in fugue in a short time.⁵On the contrary, he was passionately studying those few 12–tone scores that he could find in the USSR.

Pärt gained recognition straight from the beginning. His most famous compositions⁶from that time are Nekrolog for orchestra (1960), Symphony

2

S. Volkov, Shostakovich i Stalin. Khudozhnik i Tsar (Moskva, Eksmo, 2004), p. 406. Ibid.

See the BBC II Film on Contemporary Russian Composers 1980s.

P. Hillier, Arvo Pärt (Oxford, OUP, 1997), p. 28.

3456

Apart from “serious” music, Pärt wrote music for children (for a while he was a Musical Director at the Pioneer Theatre in Tallinn) and fifty film scores. His early cantatas for children are, of course, tonal and cheerful – this is in accordance with the official rules and also reveals composer’s ability to write for children: vocal lines and harmonies are simple yet effective and expressive in an economical way and enhanced by colourful orchestration.

no. 1 (dedicated to his teacher Eller, 1963), Diagrams for piano, Collage sur B-A-C-H for orchestra, Solfeggio for a capella choir (1964), Pro et Contra, concerto for cello and orchestra (written at the invitation of Mstislav Rostropovich), and Symphony no. 2 (1966). In the end of this period Pärt wrote Credo (1968) for choir, orchestra and piano that proved a pivotal point in his music career. Most of these compositions share the same 12-note row and serial technique, for what the composer was harshly criticised.⁷

His serial technique was not simply experimentation with pure sounds.
‘For Pärt it seems that serialism was primarily a useful means of pouring pitch sequences into musical ideas that originated elsewhere’.⁸He wrote about the world around him. Much of his music from that period sounds dark and even depressive, offering no hint of relief or escape (e.g. Nekrolog, Pro et Contra, Symphony no. 2). Did he write about the gloomy reality of Soviet life, the moral degradation of people in the West, the tragic waste of lives, disharmony and vulnerability of human soul? Indeed, Pärt had a very acute feeling of evil and tragedy of the world. ‘He sets out with almost diabolical precision to destroy’, it is ‘a world that chronicles despair’.⁹
Often Pärt used collage – being the first in Soviet music to use this technique.¹⁰Particularly striking is his quotation in Symphony no. 2: a beautifully orchestrated ‘Sweet dreams’ from the Children’s Album by Tchaikovsky. This gentle music surrounded by harsh dissonance tugs the strings of the heart. The composer juxtapositions cruelty and injustice of the world with purity and harmony, which human soul knows and looks for but cannot find. It is by no means “official” music; Pärt was a true artist thinking deeply about the controversies of life.¹¹

7

Nekrolog was composed by means of serial technique – the first in Estonian music, second in Soviet music after Volkonsky. In March 1962 the Third All–Union Congress of Composers denounced dodecaphony. Pärt was bitterly criticised for his Nekrolog, for using ‘other people’s cast-off clothes' from the world of decaying Western bourgeoisie (Hillier, Arvo Pärt, pp. 40-46). He was accused of formalism. In the same way, in 1961, Andrei Volkonsky was attacked for his Musica Stricta – the first serial work by a Soviet composer.

8

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 46. Ibid., p. 52. Pärt was the first in the USSR to use aleatoric and collage technique. Cf. S. Savenko,

910

‘Arvo Pärt', in Istoriya otechestvennoi muzyki vtoroi poloviny XX veka (St-Peterburg,

Kompositor, 2005), p. 286.

11

S. Savenko, ‘“Ottepel"' i muzykal'naya zhizn’ 50-60-godov’, in ibid., p. 15.

89

The unusual work for that period is Solfeggio, an a capella choral work with no text as such (only sol-fa syllables) which uses the simplest material possible: notes of C major scale producing a constantly fluctuating texture of overlapping pitches. Hillier calls it prophetic¹²as it comes very close to that technique that Pärt would use in the future.¹³
In 1968 he produced his major choral work Credo, the first choral work after the prize-winning early cantatas. This is the last of his collage works in which tonal and atonal forces are in confrontation. When Credo was firstly performed, it had a great success and was immediately encored. Then followed a scandal. In fact, even the first performance happened “by chance”.¹⁴The scandal was caused not by serial technique: it was less of a problem at that time. It was the religious message heard from a Soviet composer. What was permissible in works by Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms had already been performed in the USSR) was not acceptable from an insider who represented the country. Credo was banned in the Soviet Union for over a decade. The last traces of “the thaw” were vanishing and the ideological climate was freezing. Pärt was asked many questions about ‘the political purposes’ of his new work.¹⁵The composer was not concerned about politics. He was seeking answers to his internal questions. Pärt, who felt the strength of evil very acutely, came to Christianity perhaps in a way close to Sergey Bulgakov, famous Russian religious philosopher. Bulgakov said that he began to believe in God when he realised how strong was evil.
Pärt’s Credo was not a liturgical text of dogmas. The work was based on

two texts: ‘Credo in Jesum Christum’ and ‘Audivistis dictum: oculum pro oculo,

dentem pro dente…’. The first text is his declaration of adherence to Christianity with its crucial dogma of Incarnation of God-Man. Pärt did not join any organised religion at that stage. In Estonia he had a choice of close acquaintance with Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Both were historically present in that country, the difference being that Orthodoxy was mainly confessed by peasants, while the German–orientated elite belonged to Prot-

12

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 49. Ibid. One of the more vigilant bureaucrats was absent at the time, and his colleagues had

13 14

somehow failed to take notice of the work, despite the strong religious declaration of the title (Ibid, p. 58).

15

S. Savenko, ‘Maximalism of Arvo Pärt’, Russkaya muzykal'naya gazeta, no. 2, 1990, p. 11.

estantism. At the stage Pärt only discovered “mere” Christianity. The second text can be interpreted as the reason why Pärt embraced the religion of Christ: for his determination to overcome evil by means of non-violence and self-sacrifice.
Credo consists of three parts: 1. a tonal opening in C moving to G with the ‘Credo’ text; 2. a long central section of dodecaphony with ‘Audivistis

dictum: oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente…’; 3. a tone conclusion reassert-

ing the C-G-C axis with the words of Christ. The work is based on Bach’s Prelude in C major from Book I of Well-Tempered Clavier. In Credo one can easily feel confrontation between the forces of good and evil, their musical representations being the pure C major and aleatoric cacophony. Hillier writes that ‘it would be naïve to think that juxtaposed tonality and some degree of atonality are like characters in a melodrama’. ‘In Credo the two extremes of order and disorder, good and evil, are presented not as separate blocks of energy, but as linked forces, each containing the seeds of the opposite, with a continuum of gradual disintegration lying between them’.¹⁶Hillier analyses the work in great detail, concluding, ‘No verbal description can do justice to the powerful effect of this work, which is one of Pärt’s finest’. ‘It is a compendium of techniques developed by the composer through the 1960 ties, and in its revelatory treatment of the C major triad, points forward to the music to come’.¹⁷It is a hymn, as Hillier writes, not only to the splendour of Bach’s music, but also to the splendour of tonality, and finally to the splendour of religious belief. But also, Pärt had written himself into a cul-de-sac: how to move on from this point of regaining tonality without going back and simply coping music of old composers?

3. D^ISCOVERINGTINTINNABULI

After Credo Pärt was silent for three years (or for eight years if one does not consider the few experimental pieces including The Third Symphony (1971).¹⁸Not only he stopped composing, he also did not go to music performances

16

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 61-63. Symphony no. 3 (1971) deserved much praise, particularly for its dramatic form and

17 18

mastery of orchestration. ‘Had Pärt been content to continue in the vein of the Third Symphony, there is little doubt that he could have contributed nobly to the history of that curious phenomenon, the late twentieth century tonal symphony’ (ibid.). However, Pärt did not come back to that genre.

91

and tried to separate himself from all musical noise.¹⁹As Hillier says it was a silence with ‘a fermata and a large crescendo sign’. His life saw considerable changes: a new marriage and joining the Russian Orthodox Church.

He went back to history and studied the very roots of music. He wrote many essays on the technique and style of early music.²⁰Pärt knew that early music could help him in his search of new style and technique that could represent his new concept of music. He said, ‘early music had the effect of a midwife for my new music’²¹and ‘Gregorian chant taught me how the cosmic mystery is hidden in the art of combining two, three notes.²²In 1976 Pärt came out of his seclusion to full creative life with his own style that he calls tintinnabuli.²³
Tintinnabuli technique underpins all later compositions of Pärt. Its completion was announced in a little piano solo For Alina (1976). The most characteristic features are as follows. Firstly, systematic relationship of two voices, representing melody and harmony by means of blending diatonic scale and arpeggiated triads. The melody voice keeps moving, while the “underpinning” harmony voice fills in notes from the tonic triad (see Appendix: The Guiding Principles of Tintinnabuli). Secondly, the harmony is constant, it does not move, it may be described ‘as a single moment spread out in time’.²⁴As Pärt said, ‘I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation’.²⁵Pärt called tintinnabuli ‘an escape in the desired poverty’.²⁶

19

Ibid., p. 74.

20

Andrei Volkonsky, when banned from writing music he wanted, also turned to early music: performed it on harpsichord and founded an early music group “Madrigal”. The Estonian counterpart “Hortus Musicus” was founded in 1972 by Andres Mustonen. They were the first to perform Pärt’s tintinnabuli compositions.

21

Ibid., p. 77. Savenko, ‘Arvo Pärt’, p. 290. There is an interesting issue on the possible mutual influence of Schnittke’s Requiem

22 23

and Pärt’s works. Cf. A. Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke (London, Phaidon Press, 1996), pp. 131-135.

24

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 90. Ibid., p. 87. It was Nora Pärt, the composer’s wife, who in 1977 made an association

25

between triads of the underpinning voice and resonating bells. Thus the term came into existence after the technique of composing had already been discovered.

26

Savenko, ‘Arvo Pärt’, p. 291.

Pärt rediscovered tonality; and it means very much to him. Tonality, emphasised through constant presence of major or minor triads is not just a symbol ‘but rather a manifestation of God’. In conversations with Hillier, Pärt said that for him the melodic voice always signified the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering. The tintinnabuli voice is the objective realm of Divine providence and forgiveness. The melodic voice appears to wander, but it is always supported by the tintinnabuli voice.²⁷The two voices are in reality one voice. One can think that the tintinnabuli triad represents the Holy Trinity.
Pärt was irresistibly pulled toward tonality even when he was composing serial music. But at that time tonality was a symbol of order, truth, purity, not a means of composing. He did not compose tonal music as such (except the prophetic Solfeggio, which uses the diatonic scale yet avoids any use of tonal harmony). Pärt was not alone in mixing tonal and serial or other modernist elements or in quoting from earlier music styles. In fact collage, or more generally different levels of influence and cross-reference, may be regarded as a quintessential twentieth-century style. But for Pärt it became increasingly clear that a synthesis of these different styles was not acceptable. He ‘desired a fully integrated means of musical expression that would come from within him, rather than be claimed from external sources.²⁸
Musicologists, including Hillier and Savenko, are convinced that in Pärt’s music ‘the influence of early music is not a superficial imitation or borrowing' and ‘not an escape of modernity’.²⁹Savenko writes, ‘Only an avangardist could break connections with the past so abruptly. The heresy of sweet sound (blagozvuchie) was forbidden for a true artist, it was perceived as conformity and capitulation… a Soviet avangardist with all dissonances screamed against the totalitarian regime. But Pärt’s blagozvuchie was not capitulation – it had deepest spiritual foundation’.³⁰
Hillier states that few among those composers who have felt a similar need for tonality, have articulated ‘a response as uniquely expressive or as self-defining as Pärt’s’.³¹Savenko thinks that Pärt was always ahead of oth-

27

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 97. Ibid. Ibid., p. 23; Savenko, ‘Arvo Pärt’, p. 295. Savenko, ‘Arvo Pärt’, p. 292.

28 29 30 31

Hillier, Arvo Pärt, p. 91.

93

ers.³²Is Pärt a minimalist? Hillier and Savenko spend much time discussing this question and their conclusions are somewhat ambiguous: it depends on how to define minimalism.³³Tintinnabuli was not accepted quickly and happily. It was strange and alien for both “socialist realists” and “modernists”. ‘They thought I was a little “cracked”’, the composer told them.³⁴

4. MUSIC ABOUT CHRIST: PÄRT’S CHORAL COMPOSITIONS OF THE 1970-80TIES

As Pärt turned to religion he also turned to words. Choral work became his leading composition genre, and words have remained the source of almost all his most significant works since discovering tintinnabuli. In fact it is a sacred text that inspires Pärt to write music. The proof is the story told by Pärt himself about his long search for a text to write music about St. Ambrosius commissioned for the City of Milan. When he found his text he felt ‘fascinated and deeply influenced by this scene… and now felt able to accomplish the commissioned work’.³⁵‘For me, words compose music’, Pärt summed up his view.³⁶
His music is sacred in subject, but remains concert music – though it may require ‘a special kind of concert venue’ in which the focus is not on faces or personalities.³⁷Pärt has said that it was primarily the spirit of early music that interested him, not that the technical procedures by which it was put together.³⁸And it is the spirit of his music that is most captivating. Simplicity of his music does not mean simplicity of experience. The effect of Pärt’s music is most profound. No description of technicalities can do justice to the subtle and profound beauty of Pärt’s music and its internal strength.
Many of Pärt’s first compositions in the tintinnabuli style were, however,