Kanon Pokajanen: the centuries-old prayer behind Pärt’s masterpiece

A penitential canon, in Church Slavonic pokajanen kanon, is a fixed form within Orthodox liturgy: a series of prayers and chants in which the believer confronts their shortcomings and asks for forgiveness and healing. The term pokajanie is often translated as “penance,” but that undersells it. It’s closer to “turning around” or “inner transformation”: not a confession of guilt in a legal sense, but a process of self-examination and reorientation. This particular canon, addressed to Jesus Christ, is one of the oldest and most widely used texts in the Russian Orthodox tradition and has traditionally been recited during Great Lent, the period of reflection before Easter.

Kanon Pokajanen is an extensive penitential canon for four-part a cappella choir. It’s a deeply devout plea for forgiveness, based on the nine odes of the Orthodox Penitential Canon to Our Lord Jesus Christ, attributed to Saint Andrew of Crete (660–740). The text is written entirely in Church Slavonic, a language used only in biblical texts.

In the early 1990s Pärt had already found inspiration in this collection of texts, and in 1995 he got the chance to set the entire corpus to music. On the occasion of the 750th anniversary of Cologne Cathedral, the German music promoter KölnMusik commissioned Pärt to write the work, which premiered there on March 17, 1998.

Pärt could have chosen a translation into English, German, or Estonian for Kanon Pokajanen, but consciously opted for Church Slavonic instead. The composer said he was guided by the rhythm and sound of the language itself — the language of his own Orthodox faith practice, with a cadence that, in his view, already carries music within it before a single note is added. Vowels and consonants, the placement of stresses, the length of sentences: all of this helped shape how the melodic lines unfold. Even listeners who don’t understand the text still feel the weight and resilience of the language.

Pärt himself strongly emphasizes the importance of the text in Kanon Pokajanen: in his own words, he tried to take the language itself as his starting point, wanting each word to find its own sound and trace its own melodic line.

The penitential canon traditionally consists of nine odes, based on nine biblical canticles (including the Song of Moses and the Magnificat of Mary). Pärt sets eight of these odes to music and adds a closing prayer, plus two short intermezzos between the sixth and seventh odes (the Kontakion and Ikos), which sound noticeably more melodic than the surrounding odes. Unlike the odes, these are sung in unison, on a single sustained bass note. In total, Kanon Pokajanen therefore comprises eleven parts. Each ode has its own character: sometimes pleading, sometimes almost despairing, sometimes hushed and hopeful. This variation turns the text into an emotional journey rather than a repetition of a single theme, which also helps explain why the work — with a performance length of over eighty minutes — never feels monotonous.

Within Greek-Russian liturgy, the penitential canon had a place in morning prayer. Its content centers entirely on the symbolism of awaiting Christ in the world, and is full of references to the coming of the light. On a more abstract level, the penitential canon carries a message of transformation: the transformation from night to day, from suffering to salvation, from the here to the hereafter. The human repentance and penance that are sung about thus appear as a precondition for salvation and the anticipation of purification.

What makes the Canon of Pokajanen timeless is that the struggle it expresses isn’t confined to a religious context. Regret, loss, the longing for a new beginning — these are experiences everyone recognizes, believer or not. That’s precisely why Kanon Pokajanen also manages to move a modern, secular audience. Pärt himself calls the work one of his most personal compositions, and anyone who knows the text hears why: this isn’t abstract sound art, but an intimate dialogue between the human being and the unknown.