For Estonia she was an apparition of the century and, as it were, the poetic painting of herself: Successful as a composer in the midst of prominent male colleagues, she had her immovable place with music that is as barren and heartfelt as the coastal landscape of Estonia. When she spoke, her voice was reserved but cheerful. Ester Mägi was always there, not necessarily in the brightest light of Estonia's music export industry, which later became so famous, but she was there, interested in concert life, in the new music of young people, in the upheavals of the times.
Above all, she stood for two things: Through her teacher Mart Saar, she was connected to the original home of professional music in Estonia, the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Saar had graduated. Second, for Estonians it was a natural confirmation that women can compose, just as they, as visual artists, scientists and engineers, bring out their creativity. As a matter of course, women like Ester Mägi, Els Aarne and Lydia Auster were already on the stage of musical life in this country during the early post-war period. After her studies in Estonia, she went, as in the later years of the Stalin era, as a postgraduate at the Moscow Conservatory of Vissarion Schebalin, where another composer who was important for Estonia, Veljo Tormis, studied.Studying in Moscow not only gave her political protection in Soviet Estonia, it also erased the tracks of the NKVD (later KGB), the secret service, which was zealous in the provincial republics.
Her music, which was also received with sympathy in Germany after 1990, loves the tones of a pastel-colored national romanticism and yet is precise, concise and concise. In Estonia, their art is valued as a continuity in shape between the educational miracle of the late nineteenth century and our present day. In addition to choral and chamber music works, she wrote large orchestral pieces that found international distribution through record labels in Estonia and Finland. At home and abroad, she was always considered the “first lady” or “grande dame” of Estonian music. She died in Estonia on Friday, seven months before her hundredth birthday.