Jüri Reinvere

Jüri Reinvere (born December 2, 1971 in Tallinn) is an Estonian composer, poet and essayist who has been living in Berlin since 2005. His compositions often set to music his own poetical writings, whose symbolic and complex idiom is based on a cosmopolitan life experience. The stylistic diversity of his art is combined with acute psychological observation and latently theological insinuation.

Jüri Reinvere grew up in Tallinn. He attended the Tallinn Music High School from 1979 to 1990. His first composition teacher was Lepo Sumera. The pianistic training he received in Tallinn took him as far as the concert exam, which enabled him to subsequently work as a pianist and organist. Life in Soviet Estonia at this time was characterized by strong pressure towards Russification. Reinvere’s open interest in Russian culture, however, familiar to him from an early age, remained unaffected.

From 1990 to 1992 Reinvere studied composition at the Fryderyk-Chopin-Music-Academy in Warsaw. From 1992 to 2005 he lived in Finland. 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. In addition, he worked as an organist at the Church of the Cross in Lahti and as a radio essayist for Finnish and Estonian radio stations, wrote occasional scripts for documentary films and was also employed as a TV producer.

In 1993 he met the Estonian-Swedish pianist and writer Käbi Laretei, who Reinvere himself calls his most important mentor. For a decade and a half, he remained in close contact with her and her former husband, the Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman introduced Reinvere to the tradition of Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s Northern-European drama and to the psychological characterization of dramatic figures. Reinvere’s first prose works were soon followed by poetry written in English. This paved the way for writing his own libretti for his operas Puhdistus (Purge) in Finnish and Peer Gynt in German.

...
Wikipedia