Sofia Gubaidulina, composer who provoked Soviet censors, dies at 93

Boston Globe

14-03-2025

She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between humanity and God. Using musical terms, Ms. Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented 'staccato of life.'
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Soloists who performed her work, among them violinists Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke of the emotional intensity that the music required. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, were strong advocates for her music.
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'Sofia Gubaidulina was a towering figure and an inspiration to us all,' said Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director, in a statement. 'Her music, with its profound spirituality and intellectual sensibility, speaks directly to our soul and awakens our imagination in the way only truly great music can. I feel very privileged to have known her and to have premiered many of her works with both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. We will miss her greatly.'
Folk traditions also fascinated Ms. Gubaidulina, who credited her Tatar roots with her love for percussion and shimmering sound colors. She favored soft-spoken or tenebrous instruments including the harp, the 13-stringed Japanese koto and the double bass.
She collected instruments from different cultures and founded a collective of performers, which she named Astreia, that improvised on them. Later, she developed an interest in Japanese music and wrote compositions that utilized Western and Japanese instruments.
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Ms. Gubaidulina had a special affinity with the bayan, a Russian button accordion normally more at home at folk weddings than in the concert hall. As a 5-year-old, she fell under the spell of an itinerant accordionist in her impoverished neighborhood of Kazan, the capital of what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her improvised dances to his music drew the attention of a neighbor and landed her a spot in a school for musically gifted children.
Years later, she wrote concert works — including 'De Profundis' and 'Seven Words' — with parts for the bayan that expanded its sound palette, ranging from wheezing death rattles to blindingly bright filaments of sound. She exploited the expressive potential hidden in between notes in the pulmonary action of the instrument's bellows.
'Do you know why I love this monster so much?' she once asked, referring to the bayan. 'Because it breathes.'
Audiences responded. Performances of 'De Profundis' often reduced them to tears, bayan player Elsbeth Moser said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.
Ms. Gubaidulina looked to natural laws to establish form in her compositions. She drew on the mathematical Fibonacci series (in which the first two numbers are 0 and 1 and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two) to determine the proportions of a work's component movements. She experimented with alternate tuning systems rooted in the natural overtone series and considered the Western convention of dividing an octave into 12 equal steps a violation of nature. Sometimes she had groups of instruments tuned a quarter tone apart, in order to evoke a spiritual dimension hovering just out of reach.
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To Soviet critics, her microchromatic tunings were 'irresponsible' and Astreia's improvisations a form of 'hooliganism.' The dark sound palette and mystical spaciousness of her music ran counter to the tuneful optimism favored by Soviet officials. In 1979, Tikhon Khrennikov, the head of the powerful Composer's Union, added Ms. Gubaidulina to a blacklist.
Until the 1980s, Ms. Gubaidulina witnessed few performances of her own music. She earned money writing scores for films and cartoons. She was repeatedly denied permission to travel to festivals in Poland and in the West.
The watchful eye of the KGB followed her. After her home was searched in 1974, she took to speaking in a near-whisper to foreign visitors. Around the same time, she was assaulted in the elevator of her building in Moscow.
'He grabbed my throat and slowly squeezed it,' Ms. Gubaidulina later recalled of her assailant. 'My thoughts were racing: It's all over now — too bad I can't write my bassoon concerto anymore — I'm not afraid of death but of violence. Then I told him: 'Why so slowly?'' The attacker relented. At the police station, officers shrugged off the attack as the work of a 'sex maniac.'
Sofia Gubaidulina was born Oct. 24, 1931, in the Tatar city of Chistopol. Her father, Asgad Gubaidullin, was a Tatar geodetic engineer and the son of an imam. Her mother, Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova, a teacher, was Russian.
At home, Sofia and her two sisters learned to play children's pieces on a baby grand piano that took up much of the family's living space. The girls also experimented with placing objects on the piano's strings to draw odd sounds from it, a world away from the United States, where John Cage was then writing his first sonata for prepared piano, which involved inserting an assortment of items like metal bolts and rubber erasers between the instrument's strings to alter the sound.
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The sight of a Russian Orthodox icon in a farmhouse had sparked Sofia's interest in religion, but in order not to endanger her family, she learned to internalize her spiritual side and blend it with music. Silence unfolded its own magic, especially on surveying trips with her father, when the two walked wordlessly along streams and through forests.
Ms. Gubaidulina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory before enrolling at the Moscow Conservatory in 1954. Her teachers included Yuri Shaporin and Nikolai Peiko, an assistant of Dmitry Shostakovich. In 1959, Peiko introduced his student to Shostakovich. After hearing Ms. Gubaidulina's music, Shostakovich told her: 'Don't be afraid to be yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect way.'
Ms. Gubaidulina married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, in 1956. They collaborated on a song cycle, 'Phacelia,' and had a daughter, Nadezhda, who died of cancer in 2004. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to dissident poet and samizdat publisher Nikolai Bokov. In the 1990s, Ms. Gubaidulina married Pyotr Meshchaninov, a conductor and music theorist, who died in 2006. She is survived by two grandchildren.
Ms. Gubaidulina's breakthrough came with her first violin concerto, 'Offertorium,' completed in 1980, a work of grave beauty that ingeniously disassembles and rebuilds the 'Royal Theme' upon which Johannes Sebastian Bach based his 'Musical Offering.'
The work's Christian underpinnings were a thorn in the side of Soviet censors. It didn't help that Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, for whom she had written it, incensed officials by overstaying an approved trip to the West.
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In the end, her West German publisher, Jürgen Köchel of Sikorski Editions, smuggled the score out and 'Offertorium' received its premiere at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria in 1981. An orchestral work, 'Stimmen … verstummen' ('Voices … fall silent') made it to a festival in West Berlin only because the West German Embassy in Moscow had sent the score out by diplomatic pouch.
'Offertorium' was also the introduction to Ms. Gubaidulina's music for many American listeners when the New York Philharmonic programmed it, with Kremer as soloist, in 1985. Around this time, she began to receive permission to travel and visited festivals in Finland and Germany.
In 1992, Ms. Gubaidulina moved to Germany and settled in the village of Appen, outside of Hamburg. Commissions began to roll in, including an invitation from the International Bach Academy Stuttgart to write her own version of 'St. John Passion' for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death.
That 90-minute work, almost entirely built out of the diminished minor interval, sounds like a musical sigh. A reviewer called it 'claustrophobic and doom-laden.' Many critics also found the length of some of Ms. Gubaidulina's works excessive.
Conductor Joel Sachs, who invited her to visit New York in 1989, remembered being struck particularly by one of her works performed there, 'Perception,' a 50-minute piece for soprano, baritone and strings that dramatizes a dialogue about art and creation using texts by Austrian-born poet Francisco Tanzer. As in much of Ms. Gubaidulina's work, some of the argument is played out in purely instrumental moments.
'It really is dramatic in the way we assume a Western cantata to be,' Sachs said, 'but the sounds she generates are almost more important than the actual notes.'
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