With the death of Benjamin Britten on December 4, 1976, the music world lost one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Only shortly before Britten's passing, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt had discovered 'an impression of the rare purity of his music'. Overwhelmed by 'the magnitude of such a loss', Pärt composed his Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten in 1977 - both as a tribute to the late artist and as a meditation on death. The bell toll at the end of the six-minute work fades into a charged silence, from which rise the first notes of Mozart’s Requiem, left unfinished upon his death on December 5, 1791 - a work that helped elevate him to mythical status.
