The Troubadour and the Lady

As a child, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho did not seem uniquely musical. Although she took lessons in piano, violin, and guitar, she didn’t excel at any of them. And yet she was unusually sensitive to sound. She would ask her mother where the noises beneath her pillow came from. She shivered listening to the modulations of the Beatles. Once, at seven or eight, she was sitting between her parents on the sofa in their home, in Helsinki, when they began talking over each other: “I just couldn’t stand it,” Saariaho, who is sixty-four and lives in Paris, told me recently. “I started crying, which made my father very angry.”