- Paul Kirby
- BBC News
Finnish musician Kaya Saryahu, who is considered one of the most prominent innovators in classical music, has died at the age of 70.
Her family said she developed an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2021, and kept her condition a secret to focus on her work.
Among her first musical works was the famous Violin Concerto, but her breakthrough on the international art scene came with her first opera entitled “Love from a Distance” in 2000.
Peter Sellars, the director of the work, spoke of the “hidden beauty” of her music.
The Royal Opera House, in the British capital, London, presented her in April 2023, her latest opera, “Innocence”.
The opera is set in an international school in Helsinki, deals with a mass shooting, and is sung in nine different languages.
Saryahu completed her last work, the Trumpet Concerto “Hash”, only at the end of March, and it will be premiered in Helsinki, her birthplace and birthplace, in 1952.
The prominent Finnish musician spoke to the BBC last year and recounted how nature played a role in her inspiration, saying: “I was a very isolated child, and I spent the whole summer in my mother’s village, and it was surrounded by large forests on the bank of a lake in a way that I loved the sound of (nature) with.” .
She also spoke of liking the sound of the wind, footsteps in the snow or the sound of the waves, and learned to play the violin, piano, guitar and then the organ in local churches.
Peter Sellars, who has directed many of her operas, said her music had a rejuvenating force of life, telling BBC Radio 3: “There is no other music in the world like it. Each performance is stunning in itself.”
A survey conducted by BBC Music magazine by prominent composers in the world had listed Saryahu at number 17 on a list of the 50 most prominent musicians, including Brahms and Haydn.
Love at a Distance by musician Kaya Saryahu (left) became the first female opera to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1903.
In the seventies of the last century, Saraiu studied under the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the musician Magnus Lenberg at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and they all benefited from the Finnish national network of music schools, and founded a Finnish group they called “Listening Ears” specializing in contemporary music.
She moved to Germany and then to Paris, and in 1982 she enrolled in a computer music training course at the famous Arkham Institute.
In Finland, Saryahu remained a role model for musicians, both men and women.
She said, earlier this year, during an interview with BBC Music Matters, that she still feels Finland.
“I don’t think I’ve ever strayed from Finland. I tend to be very blunt and honest. I don’t enjoy speaking out, I don’t like arguing, and I think that’s what the French do a lot,” she added.
It was in Paris that Saryahu met Jean-Baptiste Barrier, whom she later married and collaborated with in her works. And when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, she was visiting Helsinki while Barrier was still in Paris.
“I’m going to be away from my husband for longer than ever,” she said at the time.
In her family’s statement on Friday, they said her condition should help highlight the plight of immunocompromised individuals, adding: “Kaya has contracted Covid twice on public occasions when insufficient preventive measures have been taken to protect the most vulnerable among us.”
The Paris Orchestra expressed its deep sorrow over the death of Kaya Saryaho, with whom “we shared many wonderful musical moments.”
The Royal Opera House said she was one of the most important musicians of her time, enjoying enormous influence over her audience.
