70-year-old Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho regarded as an innovator in classical music, has passed away. Her family reported that she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2021 and had kept her illness private in order to concentrate on her work.
Her early works included a lauded violin concerto, but her international triumph came in 2000 with the premiere of her opera L’Amour de loin.
Director Peter Sellars praised the “secret beauty” of her music. In April 2023, her most recent opera Innocence debuted at the Royal Opera House in the United Kingdom.
A mass murder occurs at an international school in Helsinki; the song is sung in nine languages.
The premiere of her final composition, a trumpet concerto titled Hush, will take place in Helsinki, Finland, where she was born in 1952.
Last year, she told the BBC how the natural world had inspired her:
“I was a very solitary child, and I spent all my summers in the village of my mother’s birth, surrounded by large forests and a lake whose sound I adored.”
She has described how she was captivated by the sounds of the wind, footfall in the snow, and waves, and how she learned to play the violin, piano, guitar, and organ in local churches.
Peter Sellars, who conducted many of her operatic works, stated that her music possessed an unquenchable vitality. There is no other music like it in the universe. Each and every performance is awe-inspiring,” he told BBC Radio 3.
She was ranked 17th out of the 50 finest composers of all time, between Brahms and Haydn, in a BBC Music magazine poll of the world’s top composers.
Saariaho studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and composer Magnus Lindberg in the 1970s. They were all graduates of Finland’s national network of music schools and went on to establish the contemporary music-focused Korvat auki (Ears Open) society.
Eventually, she grew weary of being designated as Finland’s sole female composer and relocated to Germany and then Paris, where she studied computer music at the renowned avant-garde Ircam Institute in 1982.
In Finland, she has remained a role model for both male and female composers.
In an interview with BBC Music Matters earlier this year, Saariaho stated that she still felt very Finnish.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever really left Finland. I am typically straightforward and sincere. I dislike public speaking and debating, and I believe that is something the French do frequently.”
In Paris, she encountered and later married Jean-Baptiste Barrière, with whom she collaborated. In 2020, when the Covid pandemic struck, she was in Helsinki while he was in Paris.
“I will be separated from my husband for a longer period of time than ever before,” she stated at the time.
In a statement released on Friday, her family said that her case should help bring attention to the plight of immunocompromised individuals.
“Twice, Kaija contracted Covid at public events where inadequate precautions, if any, were taken to protect the most vulnerable among us.”
In a tribute, the Orchestre de Paris expressed its profound sorrow at learning of the passing of Kaija Saariaho, “with whom we shared so many beautiful musical moments.”
According to the Royal Opera House, she was one of the most influential composers of her time and had a profound effect on its audiences.
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