\u201cReligion guides all the processes in our lives, without us even knowing it,\u201d the Estonian composer Arvo P\u00e4rt said in a recent phone interview. \u201cIt is true that religion has a very important role in my composition, but how it really works, I am not able to describe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. P\u00e4rt, 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.<\/p>\n
Filling in these gaps is one of the goals of the Arvo P\u00e4rt Project, which will bring the composer to New York for the first time in 30 years for a series of performances in New York and Washington. The New York events include an all-P\u00e4rt program at Carnegie Hall on May 31, featuring the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra; on June 2, his choral cycle \u201cKanon Pokajanen\u201d will be staged in the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s Temple of Dendur. The project \u2014 which will also include panel events and academic collaborations \u2014 is sponsored by St. Vladimir\u2019s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the perfect match: a major Orthodox cultural figure celebrated by a pre-eminent Orthodox institution. But the Arvo P\u00e4rt Project also opens up a more complicated issue: What does it mean to speak specifically about the religion of a composer whose music\u2019s spirituality has been interpreted so broadly for so long?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s 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,\u201d said Peter Bouteneff, a professor of theology at the seminary. \u201cIt\u2019s where he goes to church, it\u2019s the texts that he reads, the ancient Greek fathers,\u201d he added. \u201cThis 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a question that Mr. P\u00e4rt 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: \u201cI am actually writing music for myself, based on my own cognition. Because of that, it reflects values that are important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the listener also perceives what I felt while composing, I am very happy about it,\u201d he added. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. P\u00e4rt\u2019s fervor did not always work in his favor. He first made waves in the Estonian compositional world for \u201cNekrolog,\u201d an orchestral work critiqued by Soviet censors for its 12-tone language. The 1968 premiere of \u201cCredo,\u201d 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 \u201cGod and Jesus Christ were bigger enemies to the Soviet regime than Boulez or Webern.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Mr. P\u00e4rt was unofficially censured, his music disappearing from concert halls. In a radio interview the year of the \u201cCredo\u201d premiere, he attempted to voice his beliefs publicly. Questioned about his main influences, Mr. P\u00e4rt responded: \u201cOf course, Christ. Because he solved his fraction perfectly, godly.\u201d The section was edited out of the broadcast version, to avoid a government ban.<\/p>\n
Following the \u201cCredo\u201d controversy, Mr. P\u00e4rt 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 \u201cF\u00fcr Alina,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
It would be easy to view Mr. P\u00e4rt\u2019s 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-\u201960s, looking inward and backward. He pored over the writings of the early church, and immersed himself in medieval chant and Renaissance polyphony. The sparse, gothic music for which he is known emerged out of that period of study. Today, \u201cF\u00fcr Alina\u201d and its complement \u201cSpiegel im Spiegel\u201d \u2014 ubiquitous from film soundtracks and as accompaniment for modern dancers \u2014 represent \u00e9tudes in Minimalist technique that point toward more promising developments.<\/p>\n
Tintinnabuli comes to fruition in Mr. P\u00e4rt\u2019s masterful choral works, including the 1997 \u201cKanon Pokajanen.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
These works are rhetorically charged, their most effective musical moments matched to the message of their sacred creeds. Mr. P\u00e4rt once wrote of the \u201cKanon Pokajanen\u201d: \u201cI 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.\u201d The exactitude with which Mr. P\u00e4rt sets the text is consistent with Orthodox theology, which stresses the reciprocity between beauty and truth.<\/p>\n
Historical distance has tempered the explicit Lutheran message of Bach\u2019s cantatas or the Roman Catholicism of Palestrina\u2019s Masses. Disregarding the scriptural details of Mr. P\u00e4rt\u2019s music, though, might mean ignoring an aspect integral to a living composer, even if he is vague about it.<\/p>\n
The perspective also follows a trajectory of thinking about Mr. P\u00e4rt that dates back to the 1984 album \u201cTabula Rasa,\u201d 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. P\u00e4rt as a composer for all faiths. The global classical music market has mediated \u2014 or perhaps tamed \u2014 his religion, opening up the iconography of the Orthodox church to a broader mysticism.<\/p>\n
It is that tension that the Arvo P\u00e4rt Project will explore. \u201cSome of the classic things that are observed about P\u00e4rt, and even expressed by him, are these utterly universal human realities, like the interplay between suffering and consolation,\u201d Dr. Bouteneff said. \u201cThat\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there are narrower implications for Orthodoxy that Dr. Bouteneff said he hopes the project will address. \u201cWhat has our liturgical tradition done with that dynamic? And how might that feed into what P\u00e4rt is doing?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
This dichotomy is particularly evident in Mr. P\u00e4rt\u2019s 2009 \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament,\u201d his most recent large-scale work and the centerpiece of the Carnegie concert. In a program note, Mr. P\u00e4rt described Adam as a \u201ccollective term which comprises humankind in its entirety and each individual person alike, irrespective of time, epochs, social strata and confession.\u201d<\/p>\n
But embedded within these universalities are the particularities of an Orthodox tradition. \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament\u201d sets text in ecclesiastical Slavic, written by the Russian monk St. Silouan. Mr. P\u00e4rt wrote, \u201cI wanted to remain as close as possible to Silouan\u2019s words and, as far as I could, to entrust myself with them, to internalize them.\u201d The music, bleak and majestic, is far from the placid sound world of \u201cF\u00fcr Alina.\u201d Toward the end, the chorus takes on a declamatory tone, singing in a menacing unison as it describes Adam\u2019s sorrow: \u201cOnly the soul that has come to know the Lord and the magnitude of his love for us can understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent years, Mr. P\u00e4rt 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 \u2014 which threatens to spill into Estonia \u2014 he said, \u201cI am very critical of Putin\u2019s government and absolutely shocked about the latest event in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. P\u00e4rt said that Mr. Putin \u201cspread 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, just as he hesitates to link religion and art, Mr. P\u00e4rt shies away from an overtly political interpretation of his music. \u201cI have never participated in political art,\u201d he said. \u201cMy compositions have never been political, even the \u2018Khodorkovsky\u2019 Symphony has really nothing to do with politics. It is written on text of prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n