Einojuhani Rautavaara: the Gift of Dreams

By Edward Campbell-Rowntree

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, June 2021. https://pianotuner.org.uk

“For beauty really is nothing, but the beginning of terror we are only just able to bear”

“Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

In the summer of 1939, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016) [AY-no-yu-hah-ni ROW-ta-vah-ra] was taken by his parents on a tour of eastern Finland, to Karelia, an ancient and historic land, shortly to be ceded to the Russians after the First Soviet-Finish War that same year. A ferry journey across the immense Lake Ladoga began early in the morning, when the mist was still thick and grey; the ten-year-old Rautavaara stood on the bow of the boat, staring ahead into the void. Suddenly, without warning, the mists cleared and revealed the floating islands of Valamo, where lay a monastery founded as far back as the fourteenth century. The monochromatic voyage across the lake had given way to the turquoise domes and vermillion facades of the Eastern Orthodox Church; the auditory landscape of wind and water had been pierced with the sounds of bells ‘large and small, high tinklings and deep festive booms.’ As they began to ring, ‘the whole world was all at once full of sound and colour.’ Inside the monastery were ‘black-bearded monks, a strange language, white corridors’ and ‘soaring high arches in the church…covered with painted saints, kings and angels.’ Rautavaara had entered a world ‘full of towers, sounds, visions.’ [1]

This encounter with the high ceremony of the Divine Liturgy was transformative for Rautavaara, and one to which he frequently referred to in interviews throughout his life. But the years following were scarred by tragedy; his father, an accomplished operatic singer and cantor, and his mother, a doctor, both died before Rautavaara was sixteen, after which he moved in with his maternal aunt in the suburbs of Helsinki. He went on to study at both the Sibelius Academy and the University of Helsinki, before winning the international Thor Johnson Contest prize in 1954 for his work A Requiem in Our Time, after which he received the immediate support of Jean Sibelius to study at the Juilliard School in New York (alongside fellow students Philip Glass and Steve Reich), and with Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. [2]

America was ‘enticing and hospitable’ for the young composer, but he yearned for the atmosphere of Europe, which he thought of as his ‘native place.’ This new-found examination of his place in the world—nationally, historically and spiritually—led him to the New York Public Library, Manhattan, where he chanced upon a German art book, Ikonen, filled with the Byzantine iconography similar to which covered the ceilings of Valamo Monastery: his childhood memories had been reawakened. Rautavaara immediately began to compose piano miniatures in response to individual icons, which each form the individual movements of his piano suite Ikonit (Icons) Op. 6 (1955-56). [3] The opening piece, The Dormition of the Mother of God, begins with glistening fortissimo chords which ring out as if emerging from a tower in the sky; what could these be, other than the the church bells of Valamo?

Rautavaara’s distinctive style came about after several experiments with serialism between 1957-1965, but by the early 70s he had decided this was not a musical road he could follow. The piano works which emerged following this decision—which include the Etydit (Etudes) Op. 42, Piano Concerto No. 1 (Op. 45) and Piano Sonata No. 2 “The Fire Sermon” (Op. 64)—are a synthesis of his self-described ‘idiosyncratic’ piano technique. [4] The music is striking and virtuosic, although far removed from any nineteenth-century idioms of the latter. The usual twentieth-century criteria of dissonance can be found in abundance, certainly, but these pieces are stylistically unified by a predilection with polytonality (the superposition of multiple and conflicting tonal centres), as well as what Brandon Paul has termed ‘bilateral keyboard symmetry’, a technique which treats the piano as a spatial plane with its own axes and visual symmetries, which become a generative system of composition. Paul notes how such musical ideas generated through bilateral keyboard symmetry are sometimes transferred on to other non-keyboard instruments in other genres, suggesting Rautavaara’s musical process emanated from and was deeply bound to the piano. [5]

Wojciech Stępień, who interviewed the composer on many occasions, has pointed out that Rautavaara was also ‘a writer of books, poems and opera librettos, as well as an amateur painter.’ Clearly, Rautavaara’s philosophy and aesthetics extended well beyond just music; he was less-concerned with music itself than with what Friedrich Schleiermacher termed a ‘sense and taste for the infinite’. [6] Themes of mysticism and spirituality are to be found in nearly all of Rautavaara’s works, but the figure of the angel is undoubtedly the most pervasive in his oeuvre, although he rejected its common depiction in Western iconography—that is, the ‘pretty blonde in a nightgown, with swans wings’—as ‘church kitsch.’ Angels, for Rautavaara, were terrifying beings of great power inspired more by Rainer Maria Rilke’s remark that ‘every Angel is terrifying’ (Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.) ‘When I was eight or nine,’ remembered Rautavaara, ‘I saw an angel in a dream several nights in a row. To my mind then, it was no angel. It was a dark, vast creature, like a mountain, that came towards me slowly….They’re all terrifying, because they are so powerful, so great, so fantastic.’ [7]

This profound childhood visitation inspired a trio of works; Angels and Visitations (1978), Angel of Dusk (1980) for double bass and orchestra, and the seventh symphony Angel of Light (1995). Rather than creatures or entities per se, the angels which inspired Rautavaara’s works are conceptual beings born of the idea that different states of consciousness exist far beyond those of our everyday understanding; whatever lies in these metaphysical realms surpasses our understanding, and thus we perceive them as organisms of both unspeakable beauty and profound terror. [8] Dreams were certainly the medium of Rautavaara’s communication with the spiritual: The Third Piano Concerto (1998), commissioned by Vladimir Ashkenazy as a work to be conducted from the piano, was subtitled subtitled “Gift of Dreams.” The title is lifted from Charles Baudelaire’s The Death of the Poor: ‘It is an Angel, who holds in his magnetic hands, sleep and the gift of ecstatic dreams.’

[1] Einojuhani Rautavaara (1995) ‘On a taste for the infinite,’ Contemporary Music Review, 12:2, 1995, 109.

[2] Ibid. 110.

[3] Ibid. 110.

[4] From the booklet accompanying RAUTAVAARA: Cantus Arcticus / Piano Concerto No. 1 / Symphony No. 3, Naxos Records, Catalogue No: 8.554147

[5] Brandon Paul, Bilateral Keyboard Symmetry in the Music of Einojuahni Rautavaara, Oculus Arts & Humanities Vol. 1 (2010) , 92-98.

[6] Wojciech Stępień, The Sound of Finnish Angels: Musical Signification in Five Instrumental Compositions by Einojuhani Rautavaara, (Pendragon Press, 2011), xi.

[7] Rautavaara (1995), ‘On a taste for the infinite’

[8] Interview with composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (February 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QczoJdtCJ_s&lc=UgiPgln6XEWCangCoAEC

[9] Einojuhani Rautavaara, commentary on Angels and Visitations, in the booklet accompanying the recording Ondine 881-2 (1997). See also

Edward Campbell-RowntreeJune 14, 2021