Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is one of the most important contemporary composers of sacred music. Arvo Pärt studied at the Tallinn Music Conservatory from 1957 to 1963, where he received composition lessons from Heino Eller. His first compositions, influenced by Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, date from his student days. For his first orchestral work, Necrolog, he used Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which earned him much criticism from the Soviet regime (after all, Estonia was part of the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1991).
After his studies he got a job as a sound director at the Estonian Radio. He also continued to compose. After his studies, Pärt experimented with various compositional techniques and initially wrote mostly serial music. But he fell into a spiritual and professional crisis and went in search of other music, studying Gregorian music, the rise of polyphony in the Renaissance. In 1968 he composed Credo for piano, choir and orchestra. It brought him into conflict with the anti-religious Soviet regime. He then retired for a time and studied medieval music, including that of French and Flemish composers such as Josquin Des Prez, Guillaume de Machault, Jacob Obrecht and Johannes Ockeghem. He made his comeback in 1971 with the Symphony No. 3, which owes its polyphonic structure to the Dutch composers and incorporates elements of both medieval and baroque music.
After this period, Pärt took a different path. He began to write music that he himself calls Tintinnabuli style (the Latin tintinnabuli means bells), in which
arpeggiations of a major or minor triad are combined with ascending or
descending diatonic scales. This music is characterized by simple harmonies, often containing single notes or triads that the composer believes sound like bells. The first piece in which he uses this technique is Für Alina, a piano work written in 1976. It was followed by his most famous works to date: Fratres, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa, and Spiegel im Spiegel.
In 1980 Pärt left Estonia and emigrated to Vienna. A year later he exchanged the Austrian capital for West Berlin, initially for one year as a participant in the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. After that, he continued to live in Berlin.
The Stabat Mater was composed by Arvo Pärt in 1985, commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation. The piece is scored for a trio of singers: soprano, alto, and tenor; and a trio of string instruments: violin, viola, and violoncello.
The Stabat Mater is composed in Pärt's characteristic tintinnabuli style. The text of the Stabat Mater consists of ten stanzas, in an AABCCB rhyme scheme and a syllabic meter of 887887. The poetic feet are all trochees. This verse form is characteristic of the later metrical sequence. As in many of Pärt's works, the meter breaks are not determined by regular groupings of beats and accents, but by the words themselves. Pärt places dotted lines in the score at line breaks in the poetry, and there is usually a pause after each punctuation mark.
It has been said that Pärt's Stabat Mater brings us back to the liturgical roots: the purity of the thirteenth century. It was created out of respect for silence: the silence at the foot of the cross. It is gripping and intensely moving music. It is not a study in musical archaism, but a living testimony of belief. "This is music to listen to on your knees."
Translations of the Stabat Mater poem at "The Ultimate Stabat Mater Website."
Ensemble Gli Angeli Genève led by Stephan MacLeod perform Arvo Pärt's 'Stabat Mater' during the Utrecht Early Music Festival 2019.