The first music was birds
Before she became familiar with the craft, the arrangement of sounds arose naturally in Kaija Saariaho’s imagination. The textures of snow, the fluttering of birds and branches, and the crystal-clear silence by the lakeshore found their own particular fit with whatever music was broadcast on the radio—the medium through which, as a child, she gained access to and absorbed the classical repertoire. These early stimuli formed her first “acoustic palette” and shaped an early sensitivity to sound as a material experience: apprehending her environment would later intertwine with learning composition.
Her strong determination to pursue a career as a composer led her to Paavo Heininen’s class at the Sibelius Academy, to the Darmstadt courses, and to IRCAM in Paris, where she settled and was able to analyse scientifically what had initially been intuition: how sound is transformed.
After completing her opera L’amour de loin (2000), a work that addresses issues with great symbolic weight such as idealisation, desire, and romantic perseverance, Saariaho turns inward in Sept papillons (2000). These seven miniatures for cello explore the ephemeral through brief, unstable gestures: sudden changes in bow pressure, trills, and harmonics that evoke the fragile, unpredictable fluttering of a butterfly. In Cálices (2008), premiered in the Argenta Hall of the Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria as part of the Música para una Escuela project—a commissioning programme for various composers by Paloma O’Shea for the Reina Sofía School—the atmosphere is transformed through timbral and expressive contrasts across three movements. Here, virtuosity moves away from the showy and is directed towards the subtle and sensitive.
This openness to the whims of imagination is also evident in Fanny Hensel’s Fantasy in G minor (1829). Far from the rigidity of sonata form, the work takes on a rhapsodic character, articulated in contrasting sections that alternate cantabile lyricism with impulses of virtuosic brilliance. Nevertheless, it is in the Lied that Hensel exercises her imagination with the greatest freedom. In the Four Lieder, Op. 8, published posthumously in 1850, the piano assumes the expressive and poetic function of the voice, constructing an autonomous discourse without textual support.
In 1846, a year before her death, Hensel decided for the first time to publish works under her own name, asserting her professional identity despite the reservations of her brother, Felix Mendelssohn. This gesture culminated a process begun in the 1840s, in which the composer moved beyond the short forms associated with feminine decorum and addressed large-scale genres such as the Piano Sonata in G minor or the Piano Trio, Op. 11.
That same year, Luise Adolpha Le Beau was born in Rastatt. Supported by her family and by figures such as Hans von Bülow and Joseph Rheinberger, she conceived composition as the central axis of her professional life. Her catalogue, dominated by large forms—operas, symphonic and choral works, and abundant chamber music—reflects a solid command of structure. The Sonata for Cello and Piano (1883), clearly indebted to Beethoven and Mendelssohn, stands out for its complexity and technical demands, deliberately distancing itself from salon music in order to assert itself within the academic canon.
Contemporary critics described her music as “masculine”, a term that legitimised its artistic value while at the same time revealing the persistent gender gap. Thus, Le Beau’s work stands as a paradigmatic case of the tensions between canon, aesthetic expectations, and women’s creation in the 19th century.
