Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara (born in Helsinki in 1928) is one of the best-known figures in Finnish music of the twentieth century. He studied musicology at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1952, and composition at the Sibelius Academy with Aarre Merikanto, obtaining his diploma in 1957. Thanks to a recommendation from Sibelius, he received a scholarship from the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1955, which took him to New York and Tanglewood, where he worked with Copland, Persichetti and Sessions. Between 1957 and 1958 he completed his training in Ascona with Wladimir Vogel and in Cologne with Rudolf Petzold.

His teaching career at the Sibelius Academy advanced in stages: first as lecturer, then as artist lecturer and, finally, as professor of composition, a post he held from 1976 until 1991. His early works show a neoclassicism inspired by Stravinsky, as seen in A Requiem in Our Time (1953), with which he won first prize in the Thor Johnson competition. The piano suite Pelimannit, from 1952, draws on folk melodies from Ostrobothnia and reveals the imprint of Bartók, a link with popular sources that he would return to periodically.

Meanwhile, Rautavaara took an early interest in international currents. From the early 1950s, with the arrival of serialism in Finland, he explored serial construction in works such as Praevariata (1957) and Arabescata (1963), the latter with a variable form that took serialism further than any other Finnish composer of his time. Alongside this line ran another, which he called 'non-atonal dodecaphony', from which emerged works of a Romantic character such as the Second String Quartet, or the opera Kaivos, conceived in the spirit of Berg.

In the late 1960s a period began that he himself prefers to call stylistic pluralism, in which tonality and the desire to unite modern and traditional techniques predominated. This period produced works such as the cantata True and False Unicorn, the comic opera Apollo ja Marsyas and the concerto Cantus arcticus, which incorporates recordings of birdsong. His cantatas and choral works based on the Kalevala and on Orthodox liturgy show the same breadth of resources.

His legacy lies in this ability to integrate very different languages without giving up a recognisable voice. The Angels trilogy, the symphonies and operas such as Thomas or Vincent have made him a composer widely performed outside Finland, and his output remains a point of reference for understanding the transition from the serial avant-garde to new tonality in European music of the second half of the twentieth century.