The Lightness of Being: Conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla

“The only thing that can hold me back me is my own imagination,” says Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in the documentary Going for the Impossible. Looking at her career, one cannot but concur: this virtually unstoppable woman makes her career look like child’s play. Born in 1986, Gražinytė-Tyla has been immersed in music from an early age. Rather than being put in a kindergarten, she accompanied her parents on concert tours and sang in a choir. Her father is a renowned choral conductor, her mother a pianist, her grandmother a violinist; all of them would have liked to have spared her the downsides of a life as a professional musician. But even though the young Gražinytė-Tyla initially studied painting, she eventually followed the call of her inner voice to embark on a career in music.

In doing so, Gražinytė-Tyla continues a treasured Lithuanian tradition, initially as a choir conductor and later conducting orchestras. In Soviet times, folk and protest songs were an important means for the Baltic states of maintaining their own cultural identity. And they helped “reclaim our human rights,” as Gražinytė-Tyla explains in an interview. There is a joke in Lithuania that every second Lithuanian is a choirmaster. Even children are given lessons in conducting. Mirga still remembers vividly the first time she conducted a choir at the age of 13.

And then her career took off. Initially studying choral and orchestral conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz she went on to study in Bologna, Leipzig and Zurich. Aged 28, she became music director of the Salzburger Landestheater and is an associate conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She attracted international attention in 2016 when, at the age of 29, she became the first female musical director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), a position previously held by such eminent conductors as Andris Nelsons and Sir Simon Rattle. As the “Star of Birmingham”, she inspires the classical music scene, receiving the Jeunesses Musicales Germany’s Würth Prize in 2024. Her sincerity and dedication make her “a commendable music mediator and a role model for all those who want to experience classical music in modern life,” according to the laudation.

Music – the elixir of life

Believing that less is often more, she has retained her humility among all the recognition and publicity she receives. “This goes for both the business of conducting and also many other levels,” she tells the NDR. Born Gražinytė, she added the “Tyla”, meaning “stillness” in Lithuanian, to her stage name. Music is her elixir of life, but total dedication requires the ability to occasionally take a step back. While going from strength to strength in her career, Gražinytė-Tyla also became a mother of three. How does she manage to handle renowned orchestras on multiple continents as well as three kids? “We’re still searching,” she tells BR-Klassik. On some days, it works a treat; on others, not at all. “But it always works out somehow.” Being a female conductor has always been par for the course for her. She feels that she has immense freedom and has rarely experienced discrimination.

“I don’t know if she sleeps or what she eats or she drinks, but she’s a hundred percent all the time. She transmits this kind of energy, and you have to react to it,” says an orchestral musician in the documentary. Seeing Gražinytė-Tyla on the podium is to witness a whirlwind: she jumps, skips, arms outstretched in grand gestures, her baton whipping through the air. And then again, she stands very still, eyes closed and a smile on her lips. “There is no longer a ‘me’ at that moment. It’s all about striving in one direction together,” she says. Even preparing a work is an “inner journey” for her, during which she is also focussed on herself, as she explains in an interview. “Music is the way to be and to become human.”

The slight artist appears full of energy and yet at peace with herself. She is approachable and very much rooted in the here and now. And yet, she is on a constant search for “inner growth”, driven to learn and advance. That is one reason she welcomes challenging material. As recently as 2024, she conducted The Passenger, a harrowing Holocaust opera by the Jewish-Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg – a work “of concentrated power that eclipses most other attempts to dramatise the Holocaust” (New Yorker). If the pressures of the music business get too much, she simply has to “let her soul grow”, says Gražinytė-Tyla in a radio interview. She could also imagine planting an apple orchard in her cherished Lithuania, and perhaps that would give her greater happiness. Confident and thoughtfully, she moves forward, taking life in her stride: “This growth and this happiness – perhaps the more interesting question would be where to find it.”