True Fire by Kaija Saariaho: Poetics of Composition

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary music culture. She became known to the general public after the triumphant premiere of her Love from Afar opera (L’amour de loin, 2000), held at the Salzburg festival. The article is devoted to another work of the composer — the vocal cycle True Fire (2014), which was also successfully received by critics and the public, but has not yet been the subject of a separate study. This work is the first experience of its analysis, focused on both its musical and literary components, which led to the conditional division of the article into two parts. The composer, by her own admission, sought to demonstrate in the cycle the rich palette of colors of the world-famous Canadian baritone Gerald Finley for whom the composition was written. In addition, in True Fire through the texts of R.W. Emerson, M. Darvish, S. Heaney and the lullaby of the Tewa Indians, which became the literary basis of the work, the author’s ideas of a different order are embodied. What they are and how they are reflected in music are the questions that we tried to answer in this article.