Kaija Saariaho, pioneering composer, has passed away at the age of 70

Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who grew up in the world of male-dominated high modernism, but who broke away to forge her own identity and became the first woman to have more than one of her works performed by the Metropolitan Opera, is died Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.

She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, who confirmed the death.

Mrs. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.

In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to almost every form of classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years, she rose to the top of her field, a slowly changing industry that has only in recent years taken steps to correct gender imbalances in the repertoire.

Her first opera, ‘L’Amour de Loin’, which premiered at Austria’s Salzburger Festspiele in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.

In turn, when the Met joined the work’s list of patrons, Mrs. Saariaho joined a select group of living composers in having a second opera edited by that house—and the only woman to receive that award.

Kaija Saariaho was born on October 14, 1952 in Helsinki. She studied at the legendary Sibelius Academy there and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with other young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. In 1982 she moved to Paris to complete her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.

A full obituary will be published shortly.