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Boston Globe
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sofia Gubaidulina, composer who provoked Soviet censors, dies at 93
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.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' This article originally appeared in
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.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93
Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93. Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. Gubaidulina's American publisher, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Gubaidulina (pronounced goo-bye-doo-LEE-na) wrote many works steeped in biblical and liturgical texts that provoked censors at home and, beginning in the final decade of the Cold War, captivated Western audiences. She was part of a group of important composers in the Soviet Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, who found disfavor with the authorities but acclaim abroad. 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 man 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.' Soloists who performed her work, among them the 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. 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 both Western and Japanese instruments. 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, the 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. 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 K.G.B. 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 on 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. 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 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 the 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 Bach based his 'Musical Offering.' The work's Christian underpinnings were a thorn in the side of Soviet censors. It didn't help that the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, for whom she had written it, incensed officials by overstaying an approved trip to the West. 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 only to a festival in West Berlin 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 Mr. 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. The 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 the 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,' Mr. Sachs said, 'but the sounds she generates are almost more important than the actual notes.'
