Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Saariaho was born in Helsinki, Finland, on 14 October 1952, as Kaija Laakkonen. Her parents, who ran a metalworking business, were not musicians. As a child she had a very intense perception of sounds, colours and scents; she recalled hearing music coming from her pillow at night and asking her mother to “turn it off”. She learned violin, piano and guitar and began composing, but long hesitated between music and the visual arts.

She first studied painting and drawing at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki. Then in 1976 she entered the Sibelius Academy, studying composition with Paavo Heininen, a demanding teacher who encouraged her. In 1977 she co-founded with other young Finnish composers, including Esa-Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg, the group Korvat auki (“Ears Open”), which aimed to open Finnish music to the most modern research.

In 1981 she continued her studies in Freiburg, Germany, with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. But she felt at odds with the very complex serial music taught there. In 1982 she discovered at Darmstadt French spectral music, notably that of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, which builds music from the scientific analysis of sound. That same year she settled in Paris and began working at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez, exploring computer music and electronic sounds. She lived in Paris for the rest of her life.

Her music is characterised by luminous, shifting sound textures that often blend instruments and electronics. She liked to move gradually from a pure sound to a noisy one, from one colour to another. She was often inspired by nature, light and natural phenomena. Lichtbogen (“Arc of Light”, 1986), for ensemble and electronics, was inspired by an aurora borealis she saw in the Arctic sky. Nymphéa (1987), for string quartet and electronics, evokes Monet’s water lilies.

In 1994 she composed the concerto Graal théâtre for the violinist Gidon Kremer, then works for the soprano Dawn Upshaw, who became her favourite performer. In 2000 her first opera, L’Amour de loin, to a libretto by the writer Amin Maalouf, was premiered at the Salzburg Festival in a production by Peter Sellars. It tells of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel’s love for a countess of Tripoli he has never seen. Its success was international, and in 2003 the opera won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award.

She then composed other operas: Adriana Mater (2006), on war and motherhood; Émilie (2010), about the scientist Émilie du Châtelet; and Only the Sound Remains (2016), after Japanese Noh theatre. In 2016 L’Amour de loin was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York: the first opera by a woman presented at the Met since 1903. Saariaho also campaigned for the place of women in composition, long overlooked in concert programmes.

In 2021 her last opera, Innocence, premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, tells in nine languages of the aftermath of a school shooting in Finland. It was hailed as one of the great operas of our time. Suffering from brain cancer, she kept composing, notably a trumpet concerto, HUSH. She died in Paris on 2 June 2023, aged seventy. She is regarded as one of the most important composers of her generation.