The music of Einojuhani Rautavaara has recently received much attention, most particularly in the wake of the composer's international breakthrough in the middle of the 1990s. The interest of music scholars at home and broad prompted Rautavaara to reconsider his so-called “withdrawal decision” of 1978, in which he had pledged not to give any interviews about his music. However, his growing fame resulted in a change of attitude toward public attention. Since then, Rautavaara has regularly agreed interviews as well as radio and TV talks. With the assistance of his wife, he has even published his private recollections, which appeared in 2001 under the title Säveltäjä ja Muusa. Rautavaara was not the only relatively unknown composer to attract the attention of the international musical audience: John Tavener from England, Arvo Pärt from Estonia and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki from Poland all came to prominence at this time. It is interesting how similar the aesthetics of these composers are, with their music rapidly coming to be called spiritual, although the claims for spirituality to be found in popular music journals and magazines have not received any systematic research.

This study of Rautavaara's instrumental compositions concerning angels is based on various existing approaches to his music. The most important of these theories are those of Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, Kalevi Aho, and Samuli Tiikkaja. Probably the most revealing studies, which provide the basic assumptions underpinning my work, have been those of Sivuoja- Gunaratnam in her doctoral dissertation and in various articles. Although her focus was primarily on the composer's earliest period and his dodecaphonic technique, her study draws attention to the most important problems raised by the composer's techniques, and in particularly the omnipresent intertextuality. In her articles on Rautavaara's operas, Sivuoja-Gunaratnam turns her attention to those elements of the plot that are based on the same symbols, and notes the connections between female characters, birdsong, and angels. She draws on the psychocritical theory of Charles Mauron in order to analyze Rautavaara's output, and positions his intertextual references, interpreted as variations on the same theme, in the context of Claude Lévi- Strauss's notion of bricolage. She also examines the temporal dimensions of Rautavaara's operas, noting how time is presented in a nonchronological order, preferring instead a psychological order characterized by a dream-like aesthetic.