Arvo Pärt was born on 11 September 1935 in Paide, Estonia, a small town near Tallinn. In 1944, the USSR occupied the country, retaining control of it for more than half a century. Subsequently, Estonian composers were subject to the same authoritarian stylistic restrictions as their Russian counterparts.

Pärt enrolled at the Tallinn Conservatory in 1954. In addition to studies of composition with Heino Eller, his curriculum included classes such as “The Science of Atheism.” He learned the techniques of twelve-tone music, a style dismissed by the Soviet authorities as “bourgeois formalism,” on his own from a textbook by Eimert and Krenek. From 1957 to 1967, he worked as a sound engineer at the national radio, and composed his first film scores. He remains active as a film composer to this day, and his pre-existing works are often used in cinema, e.g., Für Alina in Gerry by Gus van Sant (2003), and Fratres in There Will Be Blood (2007). It was notably through his collaborations with directors after 1963, the year of his graduation from the conservatory, that he gained recognition as a “professional composer.” His cantata for children’s choir, Meie Aed (Our Garden), was awarded first prize at the 1962 “All-Union Young Composer’s Competition,” where his oratorio Maailma samm was also commended; however, his orchestral work Nekrolog was criticised for its use of twelve-tone serialism (it is the first work by an Estonian composer to apply this techique). The pressure on composers to conform to the style sanctioned by the regime nonetheless became less draconian after 1957, and the second Composers of the Union Congress in Moscow saw widespread rejection of the stylistic limitations that had been imposed in the previous decade. Exchange programmes with Western institutions were planned, and the music and ideas of Schoenberg were no longer officially condemned starting in 1958 (nonetheless, the following year, Shostakovich urged young Polish composers to be wary of the “seductions of experimental modernism”).

In the more liberal atmosphere of the 1960s, Pärt’s subsequent experiments with serialism, notably in his first two symphonies, enjoyed public performances. However, he soon turned away from the confines of the technique in favour of the creation of musical collages. The scandal that resulted from a performance of his Credo in 1968 was far more the result of the composer’s declaration of religious faith than his use of atonality. A period of existential crisis and extreme creative insecurity followed, made worse by health problems, during which Pärt imposed upon himself a lifestyle of religious asceticism and contemplative silence. During this time, he undertook rigorous study of French and Franco-Flemish music of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. He joined the Russian Orthodox church and married his second wife, Nora, in 1972. Over the coming years, his health improved, and in 1976, his aesthetic changed radically (notably, this year also saw the premiere of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, and the composition of the first postmodern works by Krzysztof Penderecki and Gorecki). In addition to marking a total break from the past, the emergence of Pärt’s new form of musical postmodernism, which he termed tintinnabuli (“little bells” in Latin), marked the dawn of a period of prodigious creativity, during which many of his most celebrated works were composed: Für Alina, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Fratres, Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, and Tabula Rasa.

His new style was initially rejected in the West on account of its naive tonality, and in the East for its underlying mysticism. In 1980, because of his wife’s Jewish faith, he was able to travel to Vienna thanks to a programme providing travel visas to Jewish people living in the Soviet Union (with the idea that they would ultimately settle in Israel). A representative of Universal Editions was (unbeknownst to Pärt) waiting to receive him at the station. The Pärts briefly lived in Austria, before moving definitively to Berlin in 1981 thanks to a German exchange grant.

Pärt’s German period would see the continued development of his mature style. The 1980s were largely dedicated to the composition of sacred vocal works, mostly in Latin but also in German, English and Russian. His music gained particular acclaim in the English-speaking world: in 1996, at the age of 61, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in May 2003, he received the Contemporary Music Award at the ceremony of the Classical Brit Awards at the Royal Albert Hall. On 11 September 2010, on the composer’s 75th birthday, the Arvo Pärt Festival took place in multiple Estonian cities, turning the eyes of the world to the composer’s homeland.