As one of only very few contemporary composers who write works with angelic references, Rautavaara leaves many traces of this fascination. They can be found in his instrumental music by virtue of titles, but they are also detectable in his vocal music, particularly in the operas and choral works. Sivuoja-Gunaratnam notes that the figure of the angel has appeared in the guise of female characters in two of Rautavaara's operas, Thomas and Vincent. The abstract and ethereal role of these characters makes them resemble angels, and their unexpected appearances are reminiscent of angelic visitations. The composer divided female operatic roles into good and evil (or constructive and destructive) characters. In the opera Vincent, Gaby is a kind of helper and muse to the main character Vincent van Gogh, in contrast to Maria Hoornik, the gloomy and fanatical figure who in some passages acts more like Vincent's opponent. Following musical tradition, Rautavaara distinguished these two soprano roles by giving them different forms of musical expression: Gaby is a lyric, Maria a dramatic soprano.

While Vincent is Rautavaara's first opera demonstrating the two oppositional attitudes in female characters, a girl in the role of an angel—without a negative counterpart—appears already in the earlier opera Thomas. Here, the Girl, who symbolizes ethereal purity and hints at the Virgin Mary, performs only vocalises: ornamental arabesques without a verbal message. Hence the Girl's vocal part is reminiscent of birdsong; moreover, the utterances of this character are invariably announced by recordings of birdsong. Thus the Girl in Rautavaara's Thomas can symbolize the angelic but also personify a bird. In the composer's opinion, both angels and birds are “citizens of two worlds.”

In addition to the operas, “angels” appear also in Rautavaara's choral music, in particular in Vigilia and Die erste Elegie dating from 1993. In the former composition, written to the text of Vespers and Matins of the Orthodox All-Night Vigil in Memory of Saint John the Baptist, angels are mentioned several times in the text but without specific musical corollaries. The latter work sets major passages from the text of the first of Rilke's Duino Elegies (for the excerpts Rautavaara chose, see Appendix). As the composer confided, he tried to limit the sense of the poem to the figure of the angel, who in his opinion has a fundamental role in the poetic cycle.