Einojuhani Rautavaara (born 9 October 1928) is internationally one of the best known and most frequently performed Finnish composers. He is by nature a romantic, even a mystic, as is often apparent from the titles of his works: for example Angels and Visitations for orchestra or his double-bass concerto Angel of Dusk. Despite Rautavaara's label of "mysticism" he is a complex and contradictory figure whose works cannot be categorized in stylistic terms.

Rautavaara's earliest works revealed close ties to tradition but also his desire to renew it. They were followed by an extreme constructivist and avant-garde phase (as in the serially organized fourth symphony "Arabescata", 1962) after which Rautavaara turned to hyper-romanticism and finally mysticism. Since the early 1980s, Rautavaara has adopted a sort of post-modern musical language in which modern and traditional elements of varying degrees of constructivism or freedom are combined with one another.

Rautavaara has composed eight symphonies, the most frequently performed of them being the Angel of Light, his seventh symphony. Symphony No. 8 "The Journey" was premiered in April 2000 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch. Other important groups of works include concertos for different solo instruments, among them the three piano concertos, the popular Violin Concerto (1977), the Harp Concerto (2000) and the Clarinet Concerto (2001-02). Rautavaara has also written a large body of chamber music as well as choral and vocal works including All-Night Vigil for a cappella chorus. One of Rautavaara's most popular works is Cantus arcticus, concerto for birds and orchestra, in which the straightforward orchestral part is juxtaposed with the sounds of birds recorded by the composer himself. Rautavaara's latest orchestral works include Book of Visions (2005) and Manhattan Trilogy (2004).

Apart form his symphonies the central pillars of Rautavaara's extensive oeuvre are his operas. With Vincent (1985-87) and The House of the Sun (1990) Rautavaara has scored a notable international success. Aleksis Kivi was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 1997 and it has been performed in Cosenza, Italy and Minneapolis, U.S.A since then. The latest stage work is Rasputin (2001-2003), an opera about the life of mystic and healer Grigory Rasputin.