Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina was a Soviet and Russian composer, described by the media as one of the key figures of academic music in the second half of the twentieth century and as the last of the leaders of the national musical avant-garde. She was the author of more than one hundred symphonic works, compositions for soloists, choir and orchestra, instrumental ensembles, and music for theater, film, and animation.

She was born on October 24, 1931, in Chistopol in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her father, Asgat Gubaidulin, was a surveying engineer, and her mother, Feodosia Gubaidulina, née Yelkhova, was a teacher. In 1932 the family moved to Kazan, where she spent her childhood. She entered the Pyotr Tchaikovsky Music School No. 1 in 1935. From 1946 to 1949 she studied piano and composition at the Kazan music gymnasium, then from 1949 to 1954 at the Kazan Conservatory, where she studied composition with Albert Lehman and piano with Grigory Kogan. In 1954 she entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying composition with Yuri Shaporin and later Nikolai Peyko, and piano with Yakov Zak. She later completed postgraduate studies in composition at the Moscow Conservatory in 1963 under Vissarion Shebalin. During these years, Dmitri Shostakovich gave her a famous parting remark: he wished her to continue along her own “incorrect” path.

In 1969 and 1970 Gubaidulina worked at the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music in the Alexander Scriabin Museum, where she wrote the electronic piece Vivente – non vivente (Living – Nonliving, 1970). She also wrote extensively for film, producing scores for twenty-five films, including Vertical, Mowgli, Man and His Bird, Scarecrow, and Mary, Queen of Scots. From 1975 she performed improvisations in the ensemble Astreya together with the composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov.

Her music came under severe criticism in 1979 at the Sixth Congress of Composers in the report of Tikhon Khrennikov, and she was placed among the so-called “Khrennikov Seven,” a blacklist of seven Soviet composers whose music was effectively barred from radio and television for several years. One of her first widely recognized works was the violin concerto Offertorium, published in 1980. As noted by Encyclopaedia Britannica, her reputation continued to grow, and by the end of the century she had become a universally recognized international figure.

From the early 1970s she was closely associated with Pyotr Meshchaninov, a pianist, conductor of a number of her works, and music theorist who significantly influenced the numerical calculations in her compositional technique; they married in 1992. In 1991 she received a German scholarship and spent a year and a half in Worpswede. From 1992 she lived in Appen near Hamburg and held both Russian and German citizenship. She said that she never considered herself an exile and often returned to Russia, but that she needed silence and the surrounding forest in order to compose.

Among her best-known works are Phacelia (1957), Five Studies for harp, double bass, and percussion (1965), the cantata Night in Memphis (1968), Rubaiyat (1969), De profundis for solo bayan (1978), Seven Words of Christ for cello, bayan, and strings (1982), Et expecto (1986), the symphony I Hear… It Has Fallen Silent… (1986), Alleluia (1990), St. John Passion (2000), St. John Easter (2001), The Lyre of Orpheus (2006), In Tempus Praesens (2007), So Sei Es (2013), On Love and Hatred (2015–2016), Dialogue: I and You (2018), and The Wrath of God (2020). Her output also included concert works commissioned for major performers and institutions, and music using Russian, German, French, and Italian texts.

In 2005 she undertook a world tour dedicated to the millennium of Kazan, although she had to decline an official commission for the celebration because of an overloaded schedule. In 2011 Kazan held celebrations for her eightieth birthday, including two festivals in her name, and she was named an honorary citizen of the city. That same year, with her personal patronage and participation, the annual contemporary music festival Concordia was founded in Kazan by the State Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Tatarstan. Since 2006 an international piano competition bearing her name has also been held in Kazan, and a Center for Contemporary Music operates in the restored house on Telman Street where she spent her childhood. In 2013 she took part in the London festival The Rest Is Noise, devoted to politics and spirituality in art.

Gubaidulina received many distinctions, including the title Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1989, the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 1992, the Polar Music Prize in 2002, and a Grammy Award nomination in 2023. Her honors also included the Praemium Imperiale, the Goethe Medal, membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, honorary doctorates from Yale University and the University of Chicago, and major German state decorations. She died on March 13, 2025, at her home in Appen from acute heart failure, at the age of ninety-three.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.