The fire sermon : program and narrative in Einojuhani Rautavaara's second piano sonata

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s second piano sonata, op. 64, titled “Fire Sermon,” is a masterpiece of neo-Romantic piano writing. This treatise is meant as a performer’s and listener’s guide to the sonata. My analysis explores Rautavaara’s compositional techniques in this piece, especially his pervasive use of axes of symmetry, symmetrical scales, and a submerged tonal center. I also situate the piece within the macrotext of Rautavaara’s output for the piano, noting strong intertextual similarities across the piano works and detailing performance pragmatics for the use of pianists wanting to approach this music. My analysis then proceeds to discuss the title “Fire Sermon” and its implications, compiling and assessing the paratext of the composer’s brief statements and the relevant literary texts. I also present a possible program that I have discovered for the second movement of the sonata, in Rautavaara’s account of his early mystic experience on the way to the island of Valamo. Using this discovered program and structural analysis following the work of Robert S. Hatten, Michael L. Klein, and Byron Almén, I analyze the whole sonata as an overarching narrative structure. My narratological approach reads the sonata as a whole as a mystic narrative or as a cosmology.