Jüri Reinvere (born December 2, 1971, in Tallinn) is an Estonian composer, poet and essayist who has been living in Germany since 2005.
Jüri Reinvere's polystylistic art does not follow any dogmas of material nor technique. It is often devoted to existential themes of history, nature, politics and the poetics of human perception. His poetry and music theatre works are based on precise psychological observation and are often accompanied by subtle theological allusions. His essays in Postimees and in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung take part in debates on current cultural and political affairs and have been awarded with prizes for journalism in Estonia. His music has received international attention through conductors such as Andris Nelsons, Paavo Järvi, Franz Welser-Möst, Pablo Heras-Casado, Juraj Valcuha or Pietari Inkinen and through orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Jüri Reinvere grew up in Tallinn during the Soviet occupation. He attended the Tallinn Music High School from 1979 to 1990. His first composition teacher was Lepo Sumera. The pianistic training he received in Tallinn took him as far as the concert exam, which enabled him to subsequently work as a pianist and organist. Life in Soviet Estonia at this time was characterized by strong pressure towards Russification. Reinvere’s open interest in Russian culture, however, familiar to him from an early age, remained unaffected.
From 1990 to 1992 Reinvere studied composition at the Fryderyk-Chopin-Music-Academy in Warsaw. From 1992 to 2005 he lived in Finland. From 1994 onwards, he studied composition with Veli-Matti Puumala and Tapio Nevanlinna at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, earning a master's degree in 2004. In addition, he worked as an organist and as a radio essayist for Finnish and Estonian radio stations, wrote occasional scripts for documentary films and was also employed as a TV producer.
In 1993 he met the Estonian-Swedish pianist and writer Käbi Laretei, who Reinvere himself calls his most important mentor. For a decade and a half, he remained in close contact with her and her former husband, the Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman introduced Reinvere to the tradition of Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s Northern-European drama and to the psychological characterization of dramatic figures. Reinvere’s first prose works were soon followed by poetry written in English. This paved the way for writing his own libretti for his operas Puhdistus (Purge) in Finnish and "Peer Gynt" and "Minona" in German.
In 2000 he won the International Rostrum of Composers, the composition award of the UNESCO’s International Music Council; the same body honored him again in 2006. From 2000 to 2001 he held a fellowship at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 2005 Reinvere moved to Berlin, Germany, and since 2017 he has been living in Frankfurt am Main. Reinvere is a Finnish citizen.
Reinvere’s aesthetics have two aspects: on the one hand, decided modernism with all its attendant harshness of sound, and a steadfastly courageous romanticism on the other. Thus, his music takes on many different sound guises. His large-scale works, especially the operas, take a middle path between the two aspects. They adhere to a psychological understanding of drama, but expand the means of expression beyond the tradition familiar today. Reinvere often combines advanced methods of sound production with classical narrative structures. The stringent development of the work’s form goes hand-in-hand with a thematic opening toward other art forms, questions of theology, politics, general history and everyday life. The main focus, however, remains on the immediate, sensual presence of art.
Reinvere's orchestral works use the orchestra as an integral sound body in the sense of the symphonic tradition and develop further the techniques of wordless narration. A major role plays operating with tension gradients in harmony, no longer anchored in functionality. The poetic titles open up spaces for association, rather than providing a program. They sometimes make references to specific people (Maria Anna Mozart, in "Maria Anna, Awake, in the Next Room“), to landscapes ("The Inner Sea") or to astronomic phenomena such as the Boötes Void ("On the Dying of the Stars"). In Estonia, the works such as "Before Leviathan Awakes" or "On the Ship of Fools" sparked political discussions after their premieres.
Stage works: operas and ballets
Reinvere first worked in Germany in 2000 and 2001, mainly in cooperation with the choreographer Michaela Fünfhausen. The ballets "Dialog I", "Luft-Wasser-Erde-Feuer-Luft" and his radio opera "The Opposite Shore" merge structural thinking as it was taught at the Sibelius Academy with influences of sound art, some of them employing electronically processed sounds of nature.
Ten years after the ballets, Reinvere independently reworked the bestseller novel "Puhdistus" by Sofi Oksanen into an opera with his own libretto: this is Reinvere’s first dramatic work as a poet and also a political work, and its importance was registered internationally. The world premiere took place in 2012 at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.
Peer Gynt was subsequently commissioned by the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo and its artistic director Per Boye Hansen. Tracing Henrik Ibsen’s drama, which became a national symbol of Norway due to Edvard Grieg's music, Reinvere questions the importance of national symbols today. At the same time, he sets the story within the horizon of a theology of grace following Søren Kierkegaard. The world premiere took place on November 29, 2014. The opera was met with large media response, partly because of its connotation of the 2011 Norway attacks committed by Anders Behring Breivik, partly because of its dealing with topics such as euthanasia and the lassitude of Western culture. Reinvere received the Estonian State Award for “Peer Gynt” in 2015.
Reinvere wrote his third opera "Minona" for the Beethoven year 2020. It tells the story of Minona von Stackelberg (1813-1897), who was officially the daughter of Josephine von Stackelberg (née Josephine Brunsvik), and her second husband Christoph von Stackelberg. However, in Beethoven research it is considered very likely that Ludwig van Beethoven could be Minona's biological father. Minona von Stackelberg grew up in Reinvere's hometown of Tallinn (then Reval). Reinvere himself undertook his own research for the libretto in the Archives of the Baltic Knights in Tartu, where part of the Stackelberg family estate is kept. The premiere took place at the Theater Regensburg.
Works based on Reinvere’s own poetry
Since the creation of t.i.m.e for solo flute and narrators (2005), Reinvere’s non-theatrical works have often also been settings of his own poetry, mostly written originally in English. His writing most often takes the form of free verse, but also features complex meters and rhyme forms. His language employs symbols with several layers of meaning and allusions to literary history, especially in a series of poems based on English Romantic authors. Thus, "Norilsk, the Daffodils" (for orchestra and narrator) makes reference to William Wordsworth, "The Empire of May" (for chamber ensemble and voice) to John Keats and "The Arrival at the Ligurian Sea" (for solo flute and chamber ensemble) to Percy Bysshe Shelley.
His 2009 Requiem (for chamber choir, solo flute and narrator) deals with death and dying in today’s world. Although Reinvere does not use religious terms and forms, his Requiem remains open to an interpretation of death as found in Christian faith. The cycle "Four Quartets" combines his own poems with string quartets and follows T. S. Eliot’s work of the same title. Like Eliot, Reinvere sets out to turn concrete life places into symbols of human existence. In the pre-recorded tape for the first of the "Four Quartets", Reinvere uses original sound documents from the maternity ward’s delivery room at the Central Hospital in Tallinn.