SPIEGEL IM SPIEGEL
[or Mirror in Mirror]
by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

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IN RECENT YEARS, a claim has surfaced that Arvo Pärt is the “most performed living composer” in the world today.  One assumes, perhaps, that the statistic is about live performances — and counting recordings, streaming, radio.  Still, it is an incredible boast.  Not unlike the claim by mid-20th century librarians that the three most written about people in the history were (in this order) Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and Germanic composer Richard Wagner.  Good for conversation and debate, but mostly just showing off each generation’s data capability for counting. 

      As for Arvo Pärt, whatever the reality, whether real or fake news, one thing is clear:  his music is popular, pleasing, and ever-present.

      It was not always so, even for himself.  Across the decades, Pärt re-evaluated his thinking — and changed the style of his music drastically — several times.  As a young man, he served as a drummer in the Estonian army, then trained at the Tallinn conservatory and worked for the state radio department.  Behind the communist Iron Curtain, he scored over fifty films before starting to protest through his music by writing in a very atonal way that Soviet authorities and their Estonian compatriots denounced.  He and his family were forced to leave the country, choosing to work in exile from Vienna and Berlin for the next three decades.  In his final years, he returned to live in his Estonian homeland, by then freed from communist rule.

      Not long after coming to the West, some personal crises caused Pärt to turn strongly back to religion and to study older liturgical music.   From this, he began composing in a more accessible and harmonious style, related to older chant and choral writing.  He also joined the Russian Orthodox church, and pursued hours of meditation.  In 1976, he began composing in a new style, which he described as tintinnabulation, meaning “the music of the bells.” 

      “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” Pärt has explained.  “This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.  I work with very few elements — with one voice, with two voices.  I build with the most primitive materials — with a triad, with one specific tonality.  The three notes of a triad are like bells.  And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”

      From all of this, Pärt’s best-known music provides a singular style, at once modern and rooted in the past.  Ethereal and grounded.  Meditative, yet filled with a sense of direction.  He Spiegel im Spiegel in 1978.  The title, meaning literally “mirror in mirror,” has become one of his best known works.  And, like one of his other most-played hits, Fratres (to be featured on an upcoming Cleveland Orchestra’s In Focus telecast in October), he has fashioned many different versions for varying combinations of instruments.  This malleability of instrumentation also harkens back to older (and newer) times, giving a sense of distinct occasion to each performance, when however musicians showed up to a renaissance gig would choose to cover all the musical lines among them, or not unlike a jazz or other jam session today — bringing to light new angles for the music within differing textures of orchestration.

      The piece’s title is poetic, symbolic, and figurative, for it reflects several qualities of the music itself, as structure and in performance.  There is a rising set of notes, of which many have remarked on its similarity to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  The upward repetition is mirrored by a falling pattern.  And the solo instrument is mirrored by the others involved.  But in subtle and almost symbiotic ways.  This is not a fugue, or a round, but something more akin to steady breathing, which varies slightly here and there, and builds, then fades, across time.  Yet the harmonies stay steadfast, and without the clear and obvious chordal progression that gives Beethoven’s Moonlight its propulsion and natural sense of motion.  This newer music lives somewhere between meditation and enlightenment, between everyday classical structure and a larger sense of continuum.

      Of this particular piece, Pärt has commented that for a performance to really work, the musicians should forgo awareness of themselves, to embrace the music without intention.  "Everything redundant must be left aside. Just as the composer has to reduce ego when writing the music, the musicians too must put ego aside when performing this piece."             

—program note by Eric Sellen © 2020

Performed by members of The Cleveland Orchestra:

Jessica Lee, violin

Marc Damoulakis, percussion
Thomas Sherwood, percussion

Click or tap on names above to read each musician's bio.