Passio (Part)

Set Part's Passio directly beside Bach's St Matthew Passion and the difference in approach is immediate. Bach interrupts the Gospel narrative constantly with newly written arias and chorales, moments where the music steps outside the biblical text to let a believer's own grief, wonder or resolve speak in the first person. Part does almost none of that. Passio sets John's Passion narrative in its original Latin, largely without added commentary text, letting the tintinnabuli technique's spare, bell-like triads carry the emotional weight instead of a separately authored aria ever interrupting to explain what a listener should feel.

Part has described this restraint as intentional rather than an absence of ideas: after his own creative silence in the 1970s and his conversion to Orthodox Christianity in 1972, he came to see his tintinnabuli technique specifically as a way of getting his own compositional personality out of the way of the sacred text, letting the words of scripture, rather than a composer's interpretive commentary on them, be the thing a listener actually encounters. Where Bach's Passion argues and consoles, Part's largely just recites, slowly, and lets the recitation itself do whatever work needs doing.

The two works also set two different Gospels: Bach chose Matthew, Part chose John, whose Passion account is notably more theologically compressed and less narratively detailed than the Synoptic Gospels' versions, a choice consistent with Part's own preference throughout Passio for a text that requires less added scaffolding to carry.

Passio did not emerge from a smooth career. Working inside the Soviet Estonian avant-garde through the 1960s, Arvo Part had his 1968 choral work Credo banned by Soviet authorities for its overtly religious text, at a time when public religious expression carried real professional risk. Several years of near-total creative silence followed, during which Part mostly stopped composing publicly and instead immersed himself in the study of medieval and Renaissance polyphony, a vocabulary far removed from the modernist techniques he had worked in before.

He converted from a nominal Lutheran upbringing to Orthodox Christianity in 1972, and re-emerged in 1976 with tintinnabuli, a self-invented technique built around simple, slowly unfolding triads that he has said draws on the sound world of Gregorian chant and Russian Orthodox liturgical singing, a deliberate turn away from his earlier avant-garde complexity toward something closer to liturgical plainness. Passio, completed in 1982 after Part had left Estonia for Vienna, is among the largest results of that new direction, a seventy-minute setting built almost entirely from the technique he had spent the preceding decade arriving at.

The 1988 recording by the Hilliard Ensemble on the ECM New Series label is widely credited with carrying Passio and Part's tintinnabuli style to a much broader international audience than the 1982 Munich premiere had reached, and helped establish a pattern, repeated by Tavener and others afterward, of contemplative, overtly religious concert music finding real commercial success in the late-twentieth-century recording market.