ABSTRACT
Encounters with composers are always richly strange experiences. It is impossible not to carry an image of what you think the person who wrote this music might be like in person, as if a composer’s character, behaviour and personality ought to mirror the qualities of their music. With Kaija Saariaho, the distinction between the persona and the music is especially fascinating. She is one of the most famous living composers in the world, yet she is an intensely private person; she writes music of sometimes voluptuous warmth and sensuality, yet, in real life, she shares that clichéd characteristic of her fellow Finns in not exactly being the last word in loquaciousness: she seems to weigh her spoken thoughts as analytically as her music is intuitive and apparently unsystematic. And yet there are points of contact. Saariaho has a tangible ethereality when you meet her – which is so often the paradoxical impression of her music. Her work has the vivid evanescence of a dream, it conjures a weightless physicality, it shimmers with invisible light. In our conversation, she reveals the biographical origins of her private creative universe, the internal and external struggles she endured growing up in Finland in order to fulfil what she instinctively felt as her destiny to be a composer, and how her musical voice was formed on the continent once she left her homeland for good in the 1980s, making her home in Paris, where she still lives.
