Sofia Gubaidulina, composer who flourished despite the tyranny of the Soviet regime
Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, believed that it was Soviet repression which made her so powerful and distinctive a composer, though it was only after the fall of Communism that she became well known in the West; her music came as a revelation and established her, alongside Alfred Schnittke, among the most substantial and significant of the generation of Russian composers to have succeeded Shostakovich.
She went on to win large-scale commissions from orchestras in Europe, America and Japan, becoming, in her 70s, one of the most sought-after composers in the world. Her works include symphonic and choral works, two cello concertos, a viola concerto, four string quartets, a string trio, works for percussion ensemble, and many works for unconventional instruments and combinations of instruments.
In an interview broadcast on BBC2 in the early 1990s, Sofia Gubaidulina explained that the repression of the Stalin and Brezhnev years had been an advantage for Soviet artists of her generation: 'If you cannot lay your hands on information – this book is forbidden for some reason, that piece of music restricted – when by some miracle you do manage to get hold of something, you throw yourselves upon it with an intensity probably not even dreamt of by the person who has everything,' she said.
Perhaps even more surprising than the fact that Sofia Gubaidulina was able to compose at all was the fact that the contemplative, often overtly religious tone of her compositions offered such a challenge to the official atheism of the Communist state. One of her greatest achievements, The Seven Words (1982), a chamber concerto for cello, accordion and string orchestra, was inspired by the seven last words of Christ and embodied the New Testament drama with disarming literalness, the different instruments representing Christ's body and soul.
Such works did not endear her to the Soviet musical establishment. During her studies at the Moscow Conservatoire, her music was labelled 'irresponsible' by the authorities for its exploration of unorthodox tunings, and in 1979 she was blacklisted by the Union of Soviet Composers for her unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West. One reviewer felt that she seemed to be 'going overboard in pulling every trick in the book as a two-fingered salute to authority'.
But Sofia Gubaidulina, a diminutive, self-effacing woman, hardly fitted the dissident stereotype and never saw herself as political. 'It may have been a kind of protest for some,' she told an interviewer, 'but for me religion is the basis of all art.'
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born on October 24 1931 in the Tatar republic of the Soviet Union. Her mother was of Russian-Polish-Jewish extraction. Her father, a land surveyor, was a Tatar, an atheist whose father had been a mullah.
It would be tempting to ascribe her development as a composer to youthful rebellion. Her father never approved of his daughter's interest in music, or her habit of going out into the fields to pray. Yet the ethereal mysticism of Sofia Gubaidulina's music clearly stemmed in part from her roots. She once described herself as 'the place where East meets West', and was proud of her Tatar ancestry.
She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatoire, and then at the Moscow Conservatoire with Nikolai Peiko and, after graduation, with Vissarion Shebalin. By the time she arrived at the Conservatoire, Shostakovich had already been dismissed from his professorship, yet he still dominated the musical environment.
Peiko had been Shostakovich's assistant and took her to meet him, with a symphony on which she had been working. His advice – 'Be yourself. Continue writing in your own, incorrect way' – inspired her for the rest of her life. Though she cited Bach and Webern as her main influences, she admitted her debt to Shostakovich with an early piano quintet (1957), whose driving rhythms and deft counterpoint showed the master's influence.
After graduating, she scratched a living writing film music, which gave her opportunities for experimentation that she would not have had with more conventional musical structures. In the mid-1970s she founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation group which enabled her to develop her interest in rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments.
She had a special fondness for the bayan, a Russian folk accordion for which she wrote a concerto, Under the Sign of Scorpio. Her works also include a quartet for percussion and saxophone and a piece for Japanese koto and Western orchestra.
Though her more serious music was ignored by the Soviet establishment, she was championed in Russia by a number of performers, including the cellist Vladimir Tonkha, the bayanist and accordionist Friedrich Lips, the percussionist Mark Pekarsky, and bassoonist Valery Popov.
Her fortunes began to change with the first major performance of her music in the west, when in 1981 Gidon Kremer played Offertorium, her astonishing violin concerto based on the Royal Theme from Bach's A Musical Offering, in Vienna. Success in the 1990s enabled Sofia Gubaidulina to move from her tiny Moscow flat and buy a modest house near Hamburg.
The summit of her life's work was a massive two-part millennium commission, The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ according to St John, heard at the Albert Hall in the 2002 Proms. Scored for gigantic vocal and orchestral forces, the piece interweaves lines from the gospel narrative with passages from the Book of Revelation and Ezekiel.
Other important pieces include Nadeyka, a triptych written in memory of her daughter, who died of cancer in 2004, and The Light of the End, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was thrilled when the work preceded Beethoven's Symphony No 9 at the 2005 proms.
Sofia Gubaidulina received numerous prizes including the Living Composer Prize of the Cannes Classical Awards in 2003, and her works are well represented on disc.
Sofia Gubaidulina was married three times.
Sofia Gubaidulina, born October 24 1931, died March 13 2025
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