Jüri Reinvere
[2] His essays in Postimees and in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung take part in debates on current cultural and political affairs and have been awarded with prizes for journalism in Estonia.
From 1994 onwards, he studied composition with Veli-Matti Puumala and Tapio Nevanlinna at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, earning a master's degree in 2004.
Bergman introduced Reinvere to the tradition of Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s Northern-European drama and to the psychological characterization of dramatic figures.
[22] Reinvere’s aesthetics have two aspects: on the one hand, decided modernism with all its attendant harshness of sound, and a steadfastly courageous romanticism on the other.
[11][13][15][22] Reinvere's orchestral works use the orchestra as an integral sound body in the sense of the symphonic tradition and develop further the techniques of wordless narration.
Reinvere himself undertook his own research for the libretto in the Archives of the Baltic Knights in Tartu, where part of the Stackelberg family estate is kept.
[35] Since the creation of t.i.m.e for solo flute and narrators (2005), Reinvere’s non-theatrical works have often also been settings of his own poetry, mostly written originally in English.
His language employs symbols with several layers of meaning and allusions to literary history, especially in a series of poems based on English Romantic authors.
In the pre-recorded tape for the first of the "Four Quartets", Reinvere uses original sound documents from the maternity ward’s delivery room at the Central Hospital in Tallinn.
[13][15][36][37] In addition to the cycle for soprano and orchestra "Songs in the Fading Light",[38] Reinvere's vocal music also include the cycle "Pale Carnival“ for soprano and piano, to his own German and English texts, written for the Kissinger Liederwerkstatt 2018, and also two songs for bass and piano to own poems, which are inspired by the prints of the Estonian symbolist Eduard Wiiralt.
It was written for the RIAS Chamber Choir Berlin and tells the biblical story of the expulsion of the maid Hagar and her son Ishmael by his father Abraham and thus the separation of Judaism and Islam.
[41] In Reinvere’s other works, one often finds genre borders crossed and various techniques combined, for example the incorporation of documentary material into aesthetically through-composed music by means of Musique concrète.
[42][43] Although Reinvere himself states that Beethoven's music has always been him less important than e.g. the music of Karol Szymanowski, his biographical preoccupation with Beethoven inspired him to write two further works: "The Crown of Gneixendorf" (for solo shawn, premiered at the Ultrasound Festival in Berlin by Katharina Bäuml in 2017) and the concert "Inter lacrimas et luctum“ for Cello and Ensemble (premiered by Jean-Guihen Queyras and the Ensemble Modern in 2019).
[45][46] Reinvere’s essays deal with the verbal and non-verbal transmission of thoughts and feelings, as well as the manipulation or even destruction of cultural memory.
These topics mainly reflect his own biography and the life of Reinvere’s Estonian forebears, but he also discusses the general condition of Europe and the USA.
The proximity of squalor and sublimity, similar to the themes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky writings, appears in Reinvere’s essays and in his poetry.
[13][47][48] Since November 2013, Reinvere has occasionally contributed opinion pieces on current events to the daily German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In another article, Reinvere described the fears of Russian intervention in the Baltic States after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as based on the yet-unresolved experiences of 1939/40 and the period after 1990.
