Maija Einfelde
Baiba Jaunslaviete
In Latvian music, Maija Einfelde has always gone her own route; she has not followed any broader trend, nor does she affiliate with any group of like-minded artists. For already more than half a century, since she graduated from the Latvian State Conservatory in 1966, she has been actively engaged in creative work. Einfelde has witnessed many different processes in the world of music: the birth, blossoming and decline of new styles as well as changes in the proportions and interpretation of various genres. All of this has also influenced the evolution of her own style. And yet, Einfelde has always managed to turn musical trends typical of her time into a slightly less common direction. This is true of her early work, which is dominated by chamber music, as well as of her works for organ, her symphonic music and especially her compositions for choir, a genre that has brought her international recognition since the second half of the 1990s.
A few biographical facts
Einfelde was born in 1939 as the youngest of four children to her parents. She lost her father, the organ builder Jānis Dūrējs, at the age of five. Soon after, the family home in Valmiera was destroyed by fire during the war, and their formerly simple but comfortable life changed dramatically. In the following years, Einfelde’s family lived in poverty in the countryside, and the young girl was forced to spend much time away from her family while working as a shepherd on other farms. “In the evenings I often gazed with longing in the direction of my home, which was several kilometres away,” she has said. “My mother was loving but always very busy working. I have few happy memories from my childhood; maybe that’s why there’s so much pain in my music”
Einfelde began studying music in 1952 (“If I had started at age five, instead of thirteen, I probably would have become a pianist – I liked Chopin very much... But I did much hard, physical work as a child and missed the age when one can develop the technical skill required to be a musician.”). She became interested in composing already as a teenager. And by 1966 she had graduated from Jānis Ivanovs’ composition class at the Latvian State Conservatory.
In the 1970s and 1980s Einfelde was known mainly as a composer of instrumental chamber music, taking particular interest in music for string instruments. Some of her work from this period that now occupies a significant place in the concert repertoire includes Četras elēģijas (Four Elegies) for cello and piano, three sonatas for violin and piano, the Sonata for violin and organ, and the Sonata-Meditation for viola and piano. At the time, Einfelde’s music had a small but loyal and interested following among musicians and listeners. She also composed works for orchestra and a few chamber pieces for wind instruments (clarinet, trumpet, etc.). Like Sofia Gubaidulina, Einfelde enjoyed writing instrumental compositions on spiritual themes. These were composed from the mid-1980s through the 1990s and mainly for or involving the organ. Several of these compositions, such as Ave Maria and Crucifixus, gained international recognition; for example, the notable American trumpet player Edward Tarr included her Gloria for trumpet and organ in his repertoire.
Since the late 1960s, Einfelde has also written works for choir that often highlight the instrumental more than the vocal dimension of such music. She remembers that, with a few exceptions, conductors at the time “were not very keen on accepting compositions that I offered them. They made excuses, saying that the music was too complicated for choirs. Of course, it wasn’t distinctly melodic music for the song festival stage or the more general masses of singers and listeners. I had already almost come to terms with the fact that, come what may, but choir music was probably not the sphere in which I could hope for much success.”
The chamber oratory Pie zemes tālās... (At the Edge of the Earth), written in 1996 in collaboration with the Latvian Radio Chamber Singers under the direction of Kaspars Putniņš and based on motifs from Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound, finally brought Einfelde international acclaim. Putniņš was a conductor who perceived Einfelde’s special, ‘instrumental’ style of writing for choir as a strength, not a weakness. “Conductor Kaspars Putniņš’ only condition was that the piece would be sung by twelve people. At first, that shocked me. I’ve always liked that a choir is a large mass of people and that when they open their mouths, it feels as if the air lightly shimmers. And now suddenly – just twelve people. But as soon as I decided that I would have twelve soloists, and accepted this idea as my own, the process became interesting for me,” Einfelde explains. Putniņš, for his part, remembers: “This piece did not come easily. I remember Maija bringing it to the choir page by page. When she brought the last page in one morning, she was tired and pale, she hadn’t been sleeping well, but her face was strangely exalted and glowing – she was still so very absorbed in the music that she looked like an angel from another world.”
In 1997, at the prestigious American choir composition competition organised by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Einfelde’s Pie zemes tālās... won the main prize out of 299 contestants. This opened the door for more international success, and in subsequent years her choir compositions have been performed by not only Latvian choirs but also such notable groups as the BBC Singers, Ars Nova Copenhagen, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, the Swedish Radio Choir, the ensemble from the Netherlands Radio Choir, the RIAS Kammerchor and several prominent American and Canadian choirs. In addition to well-known Latvian conductors (Ausma Derkēvica, Sigvards Kļava, Kaspars Putniņš, Māris Sirmais, Kaspars Ādamsons, etc.) Einfelde’s choir music has also been interpreted by Ronald Staheli, Charles Bruffy, Paul Hillier, Peter Dijkstra and others.
Following her win at the Barlow Endowment competition, recognition of Einfelde’s music has increased in Latvia as well. She has won the Latvian Great Music Award (1997) and is an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (2002) as well as an officer of the Order of the Three Stars, Latvia’s highest state award (2006). Einfelde has also won the Copyright Infinity Award (2002) as the Latvian composer whose work (Pie zemes tālās... and Sirēnu sala [Isle of the Sirens] for choir, Ave Maria for organ and choir) were most often performed abroad.
Einfelde’s son is the author Jānis Einfelds, a notable writer of prose with a style that is influenced by surrealism. His characteristic techniques have already come to be known in Latvian literary criticism as ‘einfeldisms’.
Features of Einfelde’s style
Einfelde believes that the most apt description of her music has been formulated as a comparison articulated by her long-time friend Mirdza Kūlmane: “Maija, your music seems to me like a bird with broken wings who nevertheless again and again feels like flying and freely taking to the skies.”
The unfulfilled longing expressed in this metaphor is, broadly speaking, romantic and corresponds to the striving of her style to draw a contradiction between the ideal and the realistic. However, Einfelde’s creative work also echoes both of the artistic directions that historically grew out of romanticism, namely, expressionism and impressionism. The imagery characteristic of the former comes to the forefront in her work: the opposites are extreme, the music sometimes even feels tortured. A deliberate, static lingering in the music, especially in her early work, leads to parallels with sources of inspiration outside of music, foremost the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which Einfelde has been fond of since her youth. She finds her slightly older contemporary Dmitri Shostakovich to be Dostoyevsky’s spiritual kin in music; watching a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as a student in 1963, she first felt that good music is also able to torture the listener.
Alongside sorrow, is there also light and harmony in Einfelde’s music? The answer to this question must be affirmative. Light-hearted motifs appear only for short periods in her earlier work (for example, the Violin Sonata No. 1), but their significance increases as her music has progressed. One must admit, however, that Einfelde-ian light is not necessarily uniform. According to the composer herself, as well as some interpreters of her music, it also contains the presence of those “broken wings”. For example, conductor Ausma Derkēvica has thus described one of her favourite pieces, the Ave Maria for women’s choir and organ: “The drama in this composition is surprising – usually an Ave Maria is not tragic, but Maija’s piece contains truly tragic nuances, especially at the climaxes.”
In the opinion of the author of this article, the mood of the Ave Maria is related to that in several other of Einfelde’s sacred compositions: Psalm 15, Un Dievs nožāvēs visas asaras… (And God shall wipe away all tears), Lux aeterna, and others. This is music that is imbued with an aching desire to believe in a miracle, the echo of the incomprehensible beauty of that miracle, and also a barely noticeable sorrow, an incapability to believe in the miracle. The music balances finely on the border between these various visual ideas. Which of them will remain as an aftertaste for the listener? That is a question to which each must surely have his or her own answer.
It is significant that images of light in Einfelde’s music often take on a nighttime or dusky feel – this is already suggested by the titles, for example, the trio Pirms saules rieta (Before Sunset), Vakars (Evening, from the choir cycle Trīs Friča Bārdas dzejoļi [Three Poems by Fricis Bārda]), Teika par zvaigznēm (The Legend About the Stars) and Noktirne (Nocturne) for mixed choir, Šūpļa dziesma (Lullaby) and Mēness dziesma (Moon Song) for women’s choir, and Nikte un Selēne (Nyx and Selene) for string orchestra. In Einfelde’s work, the portrayal of night generally does not belong to her most dramatic episodes; however, it is nevertheless very rich in colour.
Einfelde has also gained inspiration from Latvian folklore as well as the folklore of other cultures, especially from the southern and eastern regions. This is confirmed by her studies in the 1990s of Tuvan and Himalayan shamanic singing, about which she told Inese Lūsiņa in an interview for the Sestdiena on February 28, 1998: “The intonative material is very simple, but the manner of producing sound is extremely strange – like the howling of the wind, or the howling of wolves. [..] It’s something unimaginably beautiful.” In this sense, and concurrent with some of her contemporaries, such as Juris Ābols, Einfelde anticipated the trend that is now being vividly continued in the 21st century by Latvian composers of the middle and younger generations, including Santa Ratniece, Einfelde’s former student Mārtiņš Viļums, and others. To be honest, however, the influence of southern/eastern singing traditions does not manifest itself very strongly or for very long in Einfelde’s work. It appears only in short, albeit timely flashes of exotic colour, for example, in her works inspired by ancient Greek myths, such as Pie zemes tālās... (the melismatically free half-tone or microtone slide in certain episodes of the first part) and Sirēnu sala (at the beginning of the composition, and also in a few other places, such as the primitively simple melodic formulas perceived as checked signal-type calls in various voices). On the whole, however, here, too, the subjective experience, rather than national or regional colour as a value in and of itself, comes to the fore in Einfelde’s work.
A direct, personal manner of expression defines Einfelde’s attempts at monologuising a choir’s sound, underlining its individual rather than objective (collective) origin. She often applies instrumental techniques to the use of voices. For example, the most expressive moments are often highlighted with a vocal tremolo; it is usually brief and appears only in a single voice group, but it is perceived as an unobtrusive sign reflecting the composer’s subjectively sharpened and broadly expressionistic sense of the world. Another instrumental technique Einfelde uses is the sharply dotted and frequently also syncopated rhythms that invite parallels with the sound of the brass instruments; in her instrumental compositions, she often entrusts the trumpet with similar rhythmic formulas, for example, in the Gloria for trumpet and organ. In this context, it is interesting to recall Einfelde’s own conclusion that the piccolo trumpet is very dear to her – something similar to an angel’s horn. According to her colleague Arturs Maskats, the trumpet (along with the organ and the viola) is one of three instruments that is most associated with Einfelde’s creative personality and strong character: “She has the call of the trumpet within her.” In a number of her works for choir (for example, Sirēnu sala), certain high, clear sounds or short phrases in the soprano part give the music a special timbre; they appear for a moment and then vanish against the backdrop of the other voices, thereby creating an effect like that of small bells. These vocal “bells” acquire a subtle, unreal, distant hue (as opposed to the expressive and often dramatic main message), and in this sense they speak to the colourful use of orchestra instruments, which is particularly characteristic of Einfelde’s later work, for example, Lux aeterna (2012) for choir, bells and vibraphone.
Einfelde’s fondness for using one or a couple of drawn-out, expressive pitches, presented at various gradations of volume, timbre and articulation, was an innovation in Latvian music of the time. Regarding this style, she admitted to having been inspired by her interest in the music of György Ligeti. Einfelde’s music also contains large crescendos and diminuendos in which an instrument or voice centres on a single pitch, maximally enjoying its richness of nuance (certain episodes in Skumjās serenādes [Sorrowful Serenades] for clarinet and string quartet; Nikte un Selēne for string orchestra; in choir music, the chamber oratory Pie zemes tālās..., Maija balāde [May Ballad], Psalm 15, etc.). Beginning already in the 1980s, Einfelde and Pēteris Vasks were the first of their generation in Latvian music to make diverse use of the possibilities offered by a single or only a couple of pitches.
The form of Einfelde’s compositions is usually quite free and corresponds to her propensity for a subjectively spontaneous manner of expression. Even though the sonata (especially for string instruments) is one of her most essential genres, it almost never follows standard sonata form; other traditional structures are also rarely found in pure form in her music. Her shorter pieces often centre around the self-development of a single thematic kernel, which can include both variants and more substantial changes, sometimes leading to a transformation in which it is difficult to even decipher the original motif. In her larger works, such as the Sonata for Violin and Organ, several different, mostly internally unfinished themes are assembled in a row. According to violinist Jānis Bulavs, one of Einfelde’s best friends and a long-standing performer of her music: “A feature of Einfelde’s music, which is both a plus and sometimes a minus, is its thematic overabundance – she offers such a great concentration of fantastic thematic material within a single composition. Another composer might create four of five compositions from the same material.”
Einfelde herself has said: “I have sometimes been criticised for this incompleteness, that various thematic elements succeed each other too quickly without having first exhausted their potential. However, in recent years I’ve often come into contact with compositions in which an interesting idea is ruined by its excessive length. I believe this is one of the misfortunes of music today, because in reality divine lengths are very rarely divine (even for Schubert). For me, it is not as important in music to feel what is happening but how it is taking place – that is, how the allotted time is filled up.” The abundance of Einfelde’s ideas, which do not allow themselves to be confined by clearly structured forms, also explains her sceptical attitude towards minimalism: “Why do you need to dwell on the same material for half an hour if you could have said the same thing in a shorter way? But I don’t reproach anybody – I apparently just don’t understand this way of thinking.”
One feature of Einfelde’s style is the monogram E-F-(E)-D-E, which plays a very significant role in her compositions. In some pieces, for example, the conclusion to the Concerto for Viola, it resembles a kind of signature; more often, however, it winds its way freely into the general flow of the music, like a fleeting moment, and is not structurally separated from the rest of the material. The E-F-(E)-D-E sequence appears in very diverse forms: depending on the register, it might be a romantic cantilena full of flowing seconds or a melody saturated with sharp dissonance (minor ninths, major sevenths). These two versions can be compared with Robert Schumann’s Eusebius and Florestan, because, although relying on the resources of different eras, Einfelde manifests her two different selves through them. Interestingly, both monogram variants appear successively, at contrasting intervals, in her piano miniature Albuma lapa (Album Page).
This article discusses only a few features of Einfelde’s style, namely, those that are easier to formulate in words. There is much subtlety and ambivalence in the form of her compositions as well as in their expression. Her various creative periods are dominated by different moods, and the general direction of her music can be characterised as a path from extreme psychological tension in her earlier work towards a more harmonious, lighter and colourfully more refined expression in her later work. However, the aching basic tone is almost never abandoned. In Einfelde’s music, the beautiful intertwines with the sorrowful (elsewhere the harsh, sombre, ironic) in countless gradations and at times in a tangled unit, no matter whether it pertains to a reflection of personal feelings, the resolution of sacred themes or an interpretation of folklore. And this also defines the uniqueness of her creative style and its special place in Latvian music.
* All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are from interviews conducted by the author of the article.
"Music in Latvia 2018"