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The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sofia Gubaidulina obituary
When the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, began to include overtly religious ideas in her concert music, it proved a provocative step to take in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union of the late 1960s. These ideas were expressed through titles and a kind of dramaturgy that she called 'instrumental symbolism'. Switching from one instrument to another, or between different parts of the same instrument, she suggested extra-musical and even theological ideas, rather like an acoustic equivalent of the geometrical distortions and symbolism familiar from the icons of the Eastern Orthodox church that she loved so much. With works such as Introitus (1978) for piano and chamber orchestra and In Croce (1979) for cello and organ, she acquired a reputation in the world of non-official Soviet culture, inspiring for enthusiasts but irritating to the old guard of the Composers' Union. She refused to be intimidated. The violinist Gidon Kremer took the concerto Offertorium (1980) to orchestras abroad, and Gubaidulina's music began to feature in concerts and festivals around the globe. Commissions followed, such as Alleluia (1990), for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and and vocal forces conducted by Simon Rattle; the Viola Concerto (1996), for Yuri Bashmet and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and the violin concerto In Tempus Praesens (2007), for Anne-Sophie Mutter. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina moved to Appen, a village outside Hamburg, in Germany, seeking the peace and quiet that seemed to have gone from Moscow. There she spent the last three decades of her life, composing in every medium that fascinated her, from vast oratorios to the tiniest pieces for solo double bass or unaccompanied voice. As she grew older, her deep and emotional mysticism, rooted in her passionately held religious convictions, became ever more concentrated and fiercely eschatological – concerned with the end of history and the world – in tone. However, in every piece she always seemed to begin anew. She delighted in treating every new day of her life as an opportunity to search for something fresh and undiscovered and she was never afraid to take artistic risks, as with In the Shadow of the Tree (1998) for Japanese solo instruments and orchestra, and The Wrath of God (2019), for orchestra. Gubaidulina's music reflects and embodies her unquenchable lifelong devotion to artistic freedom: not merely the freedom of composers to write what they write, but the freedom of performers to play what they play ('in joy', as she used to put it, with a childlike smile), and the freedom of every listener to hear what they hear, and not what someone else has told them to hear. Born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the USSR, midway between Moscow and Kazakhstan, Sofia was the youngest of three sisters. She grew up in the Tatar capital of Kazan, on the river Volga. Her mother, Fedosia (nee Elkhova), was a schoolteacher of mixed Russian-Polish heritage, and her father, Asgad Gubaidulin, a land surveyor, from a Tatar family. Both were strong supporters of the communist order and Soviet values. Sofia was especially devoted to her father, though he could accept neither her choice of career nor her religious beliefs. She recalled him talking quietly in the Tatar language with his friends (she never learned it, as the family spoke Russian), and of accompanying him into the countryside on his work where his long silences, she said, 'taught me how to listen'. Gubaidulina's elder sisters were musical and there was a small grand piano at home. When her own lessons began, she made swift progress. Disliking 'the impoverished little pieces' she was given to study, she quickly taught herself to improvise, a skill that remained of lifelong importance; relief came when her teacher introduced her to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. The household was atheist, but while still small, she saw an icon in someone's home – 'and I recognised God'. She was proud that her paternal grandfather, Masgud Gubaidulin, had been a mullah and she kept on her desk a photograph of him in his turban, though she had no memories of meeting him. After five years of undergraduate study at the Kazan Conservatory, in 1954 she moved to the postgraduate course at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where her teachers included Nikolai Peiko and Vissarion Shebalin, both unusual composers. On one occasion, when one of her examiners publicly criticised her 'mistaken path', another, Dmitri Shostakovich, quietly told her to 'continue on your mistaken path'. She was admitted to the Union of Soviet Composers in 1961 and finished graduate studies two years later. At the tail end of the Khrushchev thaw, Moscow was a cauldron of new artistic ideas. With her contemporaries, who included the composers Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, from Estonia, and Valentin Silvestrov, from Ukraine, she was fascinated by everything she could lay her hands on from the musical and intellectual world beyond: 'In the west, information and recordings and scores were easy to come by, so you could take it for granted you would always find it later. But for us every scrap of information was precious, so we threw ourselves on it hungrily.' Most inspiring for her were her encounters with European religious music of various kinds, and her first impressions of 20th-century modernism, whether in the form of Webern, Berg and Stravinsky, or the later 'avant-garde' generation of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis. Through a friend she also discovered the instruments and sounds of various indigenous cultures, especially those of the far east of the USSR. Even from early on there were hints of what was to come: a certain purity of sound and a fondness for ecstatic incantation. The Soviet Union supported a huge cinema industry, which provided employment for composers. Gubaidulina's output of movie music was prolific. She worked at enormous speed, noting: 'I write film music for six months, take a month off to recover my health and then write my own music for the rest of the year.' Though she scored many kinds of films, ranging from the teen drama Chuchelo (Scarecrow, 1984) to The Cat That Walked By Herself (1988), she was especially proud of her music for children's cartoons. Film music was not subject to the same political controls as concert music and popular music, and proved a good place to experiment and learn discipline. Of her encourager Shostakovich she observed: 'He could make the deepest darkness shine with the brightest light!' The same could be said of the music with which she found her distinctive voice. I first met her after arriving as a graduate student in Moscow in 1984, at a concert of electronic music where her Vivente – Non Vivente (Alive and Dead, 1970) was played. She was immediately open and warm. In 1956 she married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, and they had a daughter, Nadezhda. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her second, to the mystic and dissident Nikolai, later Nicolas, Bokov. In the 90s she married the pianist and theorist Pyotr Meshchaninov. He died in 2006; Nadezhda had died two years earlier. Gubaidulina is survived by two grandchildren. Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, composer, born 24 October 1931; died 13 March 2025
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Composer Both Fully Modern and Sincerely Spiritual
The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. 'I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,' she said in a 2021 interview. That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina. Hers was never a soothing or tuneful faith. Her music is darker and more bracing than that of, say, Arvo Pärt, whose minimalist spirituality has been co-opted for meditation playlists. Gubaidulina's work is not the kind of thing you put on during morning yoga. She makes sounds of struggle and disorder; of awaiting some signal from beyond with hushed anxiety; of the strenuous attempt to bridge the gap between humans and the divine. Transcendence, if and when it arrives, is hard won. Inspired by Psalm 130, 'De Profundis' (1978), a wrenching solo for the bayan, the Russian accordion she loved, begins in the instrument's depths and rises to harshly radiant heights. Stark focus suffuses 'The Canticle of the Sun' (1997), written for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a small choir and percussion, and based on a song by St. Francis praising God. Her grand St. John Passion (2000) has apocalyptic force. She was baptized, as an adult, into Russian Orthodox Christianity, but her beliefs also took in strands from her Tatar father's Muslim background and her Jewish music teachers. Her openness about her music's religiosity — and her work's thorniness — put her in an uncomfortable position with the government in the Soviet Union. Born in 1931, Gubaidulina was part of the generation that came of age in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, allowing her a degree of freedom that musicians a bit older — including Shostakovich, who gave her crucial encouragement early on — were denied. But she still worked within a repressive state. When her 1980 breakthrough piece, the violin concerto 'Offertorium,' was performed a few years later by Gidon Kremer and the New York Philharmonic, John Rockwell, reviewing it in The New York Times, wrote that Gubaidulina 'enjoys the good graces of the regime and supports herself writing film music.' This was not exactly true. Not long before writing 'Offertorium,' she was blacklisted by the leader of the powerful Composers' Union after her work was played at a contemporary music festival in Germany without the state's approval. Her travel outside the Soviet Union had already been restricted, but her publication and performance opportunities were further curtailed, and she was closely watched by the KGB. She was physically assaulted at one point, an episode she linked to the limitations that had been placed on her. Though oppressive, being criticized by the authorities was not the deadly affair it had been under Stalin. Years later, Gubaidulina recalled that 'being blacklisted and so unperformed gave me artistic freedom, even if I couldn't earn much money.' By the 1980s, governmental disfavor made an artist like Gubaidulina into something of a cause célèbre, giving her more visibility than she might otherwise have had. As her international profile grew during that decade, she received more leeway in terms of travel, and a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, she moved to Germany, where she lived the rest of her life. Her premieres continued into the 2020s. It was a recurring criticism of Gubaidulina that her works were overlong. Her concertos were usually single sprawling movements; they could feel like labyrinths, especially given their mood of relentless solemnity. It's true that most of her pieces don't fit neatly into the 11- or 12-minute slot typically reserved for contemporary composers at the start of orchestral programs. But I've always found her music taut and riveting. Part of this may be her pieces' structures, which could be obscure — she had an esoteric method of shaping forms using the Fibonacci sequence of numbers — but can be felt as intention and rigor. Her works go on and on, but you feel as if you're being led through them by a confident guide. Few composers have had a more evocative mastery of texture. 'Offertorium' — a true masterpiece, especially when Kremer played it with his virtuosic intensity — begins with harsh swoops of violin, redolent of both modernist astringency and a countryside fiddler. Gubaidulina goes on to offer chilling, diving waves of orchestral sound and screams of trumpet, but also intricate moments of quiet: the solo violin quivering as bells create softly reverberating halos, a flickering violin line that melts into flickering flute. Later in the piece, the soloist seems unable to stop playing — exhausted yet restless — as a mellow earthiness builds in the orchestra, a slight hint of consolation. A brooding elegy in the violin's low register gradually travels higher, into a stirring aria with the orchestra glowing around it and a piano slowly charting scales up and down. After 35 minutes, we have moved from raw severity to something close to grace. Gubaidulina made music that manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident that it's irresistible. She kept on writing until a few years ago; her 90th birthday was celebrated with recordings and performances around the world. But she didn't need a round-number anniversary to be assured of her secure place in the repertory. Last October, the New York Philharmonic played 'Fairytale Poem' (1971) just five months after her seething Viola Concerto — unusual frequency for a living composer. 'Fairytale Poem' is not one of her most famous works. The piece was inspired by a Czech children's story in which the main character is a piece of chalk that wants to draw gardens and castles but is stuck in the classroom doing schoolwork. Then a boy takes it home and finally gives it free imaginative rein. 'The chalk is so happy,' Gubaidulina wrote, 'it does not even notice how it is dissolving in the drawing of this beautiful world.' Hardly a religious subject, but the atmosphere of mysterious vibration gives it a kind of spiritual luminousness. Whether the chalk is a metaphor for the life of an artist — particularly a life under authoritarian rule — is left ambiguous to the vaporous end.
