Einojuhani Rautavaara (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈei̯noˌjuhɑni ˈrɑu̯tɑˌʋɑːrɑ] ; 9 October 1928 – 27 July 2016) was a Finnish composer of classical music. Among the most notable Finnish composers since Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), Rautavaara wrote a great number of works spanning various styles. These include eight symphonies, nine operas and fifteen concertos, as well as numerous vocal and chamber works. Having written early works using 12-tone serial techniques, his later music may be described as neo-romantic and mystical. His major works include his first piano concerto (1969), Cantus Arcticus (1972) and his seventh symphony, Angel of Light (1994).
Rautavaara was born in Helsinki in 1928. His father Eino Alfred Rautavaara (né Jernberg; 1876–1939; he Finnicized his last name in 1901) was an opera singer and cantor, and his mother Elsa Katariina Rautavaara (née Teräskeli; originally Träskelin) (1898–1944) was a doctor. His early childhood was molded by the musicianship of his father, and at the encouragement of his mother, Einojuhani began to casually learn piano when he was young. His father died when Einojuhani was ten years old, with his mother dying less than six years later. He went to live with his aunt Hilja Helena Teräskeli (1893–1958) in the city of Turku, where he began taking formal piano lessons at the age of 17.
Rautavaara attended the University of Helsinki to study piano and musicology, and eventually studied composition at the Sibelius Academy under Aarre Merikanto from 1948 to 1952. He first came to international attention when he won the Thor Johnson Contest for his composition A Requiem in Our Time in 1954, despite having, according to Rautavaara, "...absolutely no experience of writing for brass band and [a] composition technique [that] was immature at the time..." The work caught the attention of then-famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, prompting him to recommend Rautavaara for a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School in New York City. There he was taught by Vincent Persichetti, and he also took lessons from Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. Reflecting on his time enrolled in Juilliard, Rautavaara later said that living in Manhattan was, "Maybe the most important experience, [and] taught much more about life to me than all those teachers about music." He then returned to Helsinki and graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 1957, later choosing to study further in Switzerland that same year, under the tutelage of Swiss composer Wladimir Vogel. The following year, he traveled to Cologne, Germany to study under German composer Rudolf Petzold.
Rautavaara served as a non-tenured teacher at the Sibelius Academy from 1957 to 1959, music archivist of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra from 1959 to 1961, rector of the Käpylä Music Institute in Helsinki from 1965 to 1966, tenured teacher at the Sibelius Academy from 1966 to 1976, artist professor (appointed by the Arts Council of Finland) from 1971 to 1976, and professor of composition at the Sibelius Academy from 1976 to 1990. Some of his more famous pupils during this era were Finnish composer Kalevi Aho and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.
He married Heidi Maria "Mariaheidi" Suovanen, an actress, in 1959. Together they had two sons, Markojuhani and Olof, and a daughter, Yrja. The couple separated in 1982 and divorced in 1984, after he fell in love with Sinikka Koivisto, who was 29 years his junior. In 1984 he married Sinikka.
Rautavaara was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Music in 1985.
After an aortic dissection in January 2004, Rautavaara spent almost half a year in intensive care before recovering and continuing his work. The Finnish government gave him strong support during this time, and named him an arts professor, paying him only to compose. He died on 27 July 2016 in Helsinki from complications of hip surgery.
Rautavaara was a prolific composer and wrote in a variety of forms and styles. His oeuvre can be broadly divided into four periods: an early "neoclassical" period of the 1950s, exhibiting close ties to tradition; an avant-garde and constructivist stage of the 1960s, when he experimented with serial techniques, but abandoned them later in the decade; a "neo-romantic" period of the late 1960s and the 1970s; and an eclectic, "post-modern" compositional style in which he blended a wide spectrum of stylistic techniques and genres. A recurring label given to his opus is "mysticism", for his fascination with metaphysical and religious subjects and texts. (Several of his works have titles which allude to angels.)
His compositions include eight symphonies, 15 concertos, choral works (several for unaccompanied choir, including Vigilia (1971–1972)), sonatas for various instruments, string quartets and other chamber music, and a number of biographical operas including Vincent (1986–1987, based on the life of Vincent van Gogh), Aleksis Kivi (1995–1996) and Rasputin (2001–2003).
In the performance notes of his 1999 piece Autumn Gardens, Rautavaara writes, "I have often compared composing to gardening. In both processes, one observes and controls organic growth rather than constructing or assembling existing components and elements. I would also like to think that my compositions are rather like 'English gardens', freely growing and organic, as opposed to those that are pruned to geometric precision and severity."
He has also described that he would first pick the instrumentation of a piece, where the music could then "grow organically" as a concept.
Along with Erik Bergman, Rautavaara was one of the pioneers of serial composing in Finland in the early 1950s, although in the end he completed only a few serial works. His most important works from the period are the Third and Fourth Symphony, and the opera Kaivos (The Mine), which saw only a television production in 1963, but was a source of material for the string orchestra pieces Canto I (1960) and Canto II (1961), and for the Third String Quartet (1965). Even his serial works from the period carry obvious romantic and post-expressionist notes stylistically closer to Alban Berg and Anton Bruckner than more straightforward serialists such as Pierre Boulez. Rautavaara himself referred to the Third as the "Bruckner symphony".
His use of these 12-tone and serialist techniques was highly uncommon in Finland at the time, allowing Rautavaara to become a controversial figure, and pushing him to the forefront of the Finnish classical music scene, alongside composers Joonas Kokkonen and Erkki Salmenhaara. In the mid-1960s, however, Rautavaara fell into a creative crisis with serialism, realizing that the composition method was immensely laborious and its distance from the outcome too large. He later recalled that "...the modernism of that time, [...] that is the serialism in music, which I had experimented with, [...] was not a road for me to follow." He experimented and found a resolution towards the end of the decade, when he began to explore different styles as he had earlier done in the Third Symphony. The Bach-influenced Cello Concerto No.1 (1968) and Debussy-influenced Anadyomene (1968) opened his creative deadlock. More eclectic works started to emerge, whose style loans and compositional techniques over time became characteristic of his style. Its hallmarks included three-chord-based, often modal harmonies, ringing softly romantic orchestrals, modernism springing from the new play modes, and finally the return of the twelve-tone passages embedded into the musical texture.
The 1970s were Rautavaara's most productive period. According to Rautavaara, it was during this period that he had discovered a "synthesis" and until that point he was merely a student, collecting information on various styles and techniques. In a short time he composed an extensive body of music, most of which has withstood the test of time. The softly-sounding new style was noticed by choirs, who commissioned a number of choral songs from the composer. His major choral works Vigilia and True and False Unicorn were made during 1971. Cantus Arcticus followed immediately after, in the beginning of 1972, and in the summer he composed an extensive score for male choir, A Book of Life.