Sarah Was Ninety Years Old

Sarah Was 90 Years Old has a unique story of creation. Pärt composed this music in spring 1976, the time that also marked the birth of his tintinnabuli style. However, Sarah… is not a work in tintinnabuli technique, but serves as an important step to arriving at the new style.

The piece is based on a story of Sarah, the infertile wife of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, who delivers a son at an old age, thus fulfilling God’s prophecy and promise to Abraham.

Arvo Pärt: „Sarah Was 90 Years Old was composed before I arrived at determining my tintinnabuli style, and it is probably my simplest and also most abstract work. It was born from the relations between numbers and is only based on four notes. The 48 possible com…

Sarah Was 90 Years Old has a unique story of creation. Pärt composed this music in spring 1976, the time that also marked the birth of his tintinnabuli style. However, Sarah… is not a work in tintinnabuli technique, but serves as an important step to arriving at the new style.

The piece is based on a story of Sarah, the infertile wife of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, who delivers a son at an old age, thus fulfilling God’s prophecy and promise to Abraham.

Arvo Pärt: „Sarah Was 90 Years Old was composed before I arrived at determining my tintinnabuli style, and it is probably my simplest and also most abstract work. It was born from the relations between numbers and is only based on four notes. The 48 possible combinations of these four sounds are complemented by different derivations of a simple rhythm, achieved by means of shifts in the scale. /--/ At the end of the various combinations one can indeed do nothing other than begin all over again and follow exactly the same path as before: the path of Sarah’s infertility. The result is always zero, an arid desert, until the angels sent by God appear and and everything comes to a close. In the finale of the work a melody arises spontaneously – a sort of lullaby for Isaac. As you see, this is a music based purely on numbers, and I may add that this concentration, this encapsulation within a mathematical formula was something that fascinated me from the beginning …”

The vocal part of the composition does not present a specific text, but is instead a vocalise. However, the composer already marked the sketches for the piece with the name Sarah in his musical diaries. Since it was not possible to reveal its actual message during the Soviet era, Arvo Pärt gave his work a modest title, Modus (Latin for “way, method”). The composition was premiered at a semi-secret event at the Student Club of the Riga Polytechnic Institute in April 1976, performed in its original instrumentation by the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus: soprano, percussion (tom-tom drum and tambourine), harpsichord, double bass (or bass guitar), violin (or electric guitar) and piano (or tam-tam).

In 1980s, after his emigration, Pärt repeatedly re-worked the composition by changing the orchestration (now sopran, 2 tenors, percussion and organ) and reinstated its original title, given in the English translation as Sarah Was 90 Years Old in the published scores.