Obituary, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016)

News reached us this morning of the death of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara at the age of 87, following complications during surgery. Widely seen as the heir to Jean Sibelius and the foremost Finnish composer of the latter half of the twentieth century, he lived through a time of considerable prosperity and cultural richness for his country that Sibelius’s generation of nationalists would have been pleased to see.

Musically, Rautavaara’s development traces a similarly eclectic path to that of his Baltic contemporaries, particularly the venerable Estonian Arvo Pärt – both men’s early works are characterised by avant-garde techniques such as serialism, but both moved away from this style in their later compositions and embraced a more tonal idiom that, for all that it has been disparaged as lacking in substance, is both appealing and distinctive. Indeed, some of Rautavaara’s recent works (his Missa A Cappella, for example) fit very neatly into the mould of the Scandinavian “mystical” composers. Haunting, ethereal choral harmonies are very much du jour, but Rautavaara’s choral writing in this vein is powerful and profound, much more than merely inconsequential Nordic pleasantry.

This is only a tiny part of the whole picture, however; one Mass cannot fairly represent a composer of eight symphonies, fourteen concertos, chamber music and operas. Among Rautavaara’s most popular works are those using taped recordings – particularly his Cantus Arcticus, a short but striking work incorporating the songs of birds from the Liminka region of Finland. Many of his works concern themselves with angels and the mystical – none more so than his seventh symphony, Angel of Light, probably his most popular and most acclaimed composition.

Rautavaara was still composing right up until his death; he leaves unfinished, among other works, a major opera based on the writings of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

A list of Rautavaara's major works can be found here.