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.