Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina has died at age 93 : NPR

Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, an intellectually probing artist who fused sound and spirituality, died Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93 years old.

Her death was confirmed by her publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, who called Gubaidulina “the grande dame of new music.”

One of the first modern women composers to reach international acclaim, Gubaidulina’s singular style was often large in scope, both musically and philosophically, yet intimate in the painterly details she conjured from an orchestra.

In 2021, to mark her 90th birthday, conductor Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig released an album containing three huge symphonic pieces each with deeply metaphysical underpinnings. Gramophone magazine called it “One of the most remarkable musical and spiritual journeys ever conceived, by a composer whose personal modesty would never lead you guess that she commands the forces of the Apocalypse.” One of the works on the album, The Wrath of God, opens with a horde of snarling tubas and ends with a wink and a rhythmic nod to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

“I think she’s one of the great living legends,” Nelsons told NPR in 2022. “When we perform any music, we are looking for what is between the notes and we go, ‘What does the music reflect, what character, or what feeling or what state of mind?’ With her music, it’s very emotionally charged and full of these metaphoric and universal ideas, which immediately affect the audience. It’s always so wonderful to see that.”

In a 2017 interview with the BBVA Foundation, Gubaidulina talked about the power of music in sweeping terms. “The art of music is consistent with the task of expanding the higher dimension of our lives,” she said. A deeply religious artist, she once described her writing process as speaking with God.

Sofia Gubaidulina was born on Oct. 24, 1931, in Christopol, in the rural Tatar region of the Soviet Union, 600 miles east of Moscow. Her family was poor, and she recalled a bleak existence as a child playing in a yard without grass for a 1990 BBC documentary. “Suddenly the child’s imagination turned to the sky,” she said. “I sat in that bare yard, with a rubbish dump in the middle, nothing else for a child’s ideas. I looked up at the sky, and I began to live up there.”

She also began to live within the sounds of the piano. When Gubaidulina began music school, a piano was delivered to her home. “In purely acoustic terms it was heavenly,” she remembered. “You could sit underneath and hear unusual sounds. You could play directly on the strings, or the keyboard. There were so many possibilities.” In her 2017 interview, she admitted “That was the impulse that inspired me to devote my life to music and art. I wanted to shape sound matter.”

Gubaidulina’s formal studies, in piano and composition, began at the conservatory in the region’s capital city of Kazan, where she graduated in 1954. She enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory and in 1959 met the revered composer Dmitri Shostakovich who gave the young Gubaidulina key advice, boosting her confidence. After hearing her perform a piano reduction of the symphony she’d written for her final exam, the elder composer told her, “My wish for you is that you should continue on your own incorrect path.” In other words, do not compromise your vision.

Gubaidulina’s path proved to be one of trials and triumphs. In 1973, a stranger attempted to strangle her in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. A KGB agent was suspected, and yet Gubaidulina scared off the attacker when she asked him why he was taking so long to kill her. In 1979, her music, along with that of six colleagues, was officially denounced as “noisy mud” by the very Soviet Composers’ Union Gubaidulina joined in 1961.

Like Shostakovich, Gubaidulina composed a variety of film scores to earn a living during the Soviet era, including one for the 1973 animated feature, Adventures of Mowgli, based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Also beginning in the 1970s, Gubaidulina was active as a co-founding member of the improvisation group Astrea, where she could focus on the Asian roots of her family tree. “On my father’s side I’m a Tatar and on my mother’s side I am Slavic,” she told the BBC, adding, “I discovered that playing Eastern instruments allows you to understand more about yourself.”

One of the first works to capture the attention of Western audiences was Offertorium, her first violin concerto, premiered by Gidon Kremer in 1981. Based on a theme from Bach’s Musical Offering, the musical kernel is meticulously dissected, expanded and completely reconstructed. She wrote two more violin concertos – In Tempus Praesens for Anne-Sophie Mutter in 2007, and Dialogue: I and You for Vadim Repin in 2018.

“In tempus praesens holds a very special place in my heart because it’s music of such emotional depth and such incredible compositorial noblesse and skill,” Mutter said in a 2010 New York Philharmonic video. She added that the work is extremely demanding for the orchestra, including the percussion section. “We have this incredible gong, when hit you need two percussionists to lean against it, to dim it down. It’s as if the Earth is opening up. And this is used several times in the score to finish a musical thought and to signal a new musical idea coming.”

Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Simon Rattle also received pieces from Gubaidulina. Her Symphony in 12 Movements (Stimmen …Verstummen), for conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky in 1986, harnesses the full potential of a large symphony orchestra in its fleeting moments of sound clusters and chaotic turbulence. Yet it includes a brief, nearly silent passage for a conductor “solo,” where hand gestures are diagrammed and, in performance, looks like a cross between semaphore and the lyrical arm motions of Asian dance.

For her music, Gubaidulina took inspiration from a broad range of sources. While Asian and Western philosophy played a large role, she has adapted ancient Egyptian and Persian poetry, and has cited other composers as major influences even though her music stands as completely her own. “My spiritual nourishment came from German culture,” she recalled to the BBC. “Goethe, Hegel, Novalis. Bach, Webern, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. There was such a diversity of origins inside me.”

Valentina Kholopova, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory who published a biography of the composer in 2020, told NPR in 2022 that the strength of Gubaidulina’s music lives in it’s all-encompassing objectives. “It is distinguished by the seriousness and the significance of its musical ideas – about the entire world, about all people, about their destiny and history,” she said. “And this requires significant amplitude on the part of her compositions.”

Gradually Gubaidulina’s music became more overtly spiritual. While her paternal grandfather was a mullah who translated the Koran, her parents were dutifully non-religious. When she was five, she visited a woman who displayed an icon of Christ in her home. Gubaidulina said she recognized God at that moment and the experience remained with her. “Somehow music merged naturally with religion,” she said, “and sound became sacred to me.” In 2000, as a commission to celebrate the millennium, Gubaidulina composed her St. John Passion, a mammoth oratorio for chorus and orchestra which premiered in Stuttgart, Germany.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina made her home in Appen, a rural village near the outskirts of Hamburg, Germany, where the silence of the surrounding woods helped her focus on fulfilling her many commissions.

In 2019, Nelsons invited Gubaidulina to serve as composer in residence at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. While her music tended toward the serious, Nelsons said there were sparks of humor not only within the compositions but also in her personality.

“She’s very intellectual, but also emotional — and she’s balancing with herself,” he said. “And then I think that the sense of humor is a very fine line. I mean if you hear double bass and contra-bassoon, it normally associates with humor. But she manages to use those instruments both with the feeling of humor, but also with a very serious and dangerous feeling.”

Gubaidulina earned over 40 awards and prizes, including honorary doctorates from Beijing Conservatory, University of Chicago, Yale University and Kyiv Music Academy. Her prizes included the Rome International Composer’s Competition in 1974, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 1998 and Spain’s BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award in 2017.

After winning the latter award, when Gubaidulina was asked in what sense her music might advance the frontiers of knowledge, she said: “The art of music is capable of touching and approaching mysteries and laws existing in the cosmos and in the world.”

“In the end, that’s what the world of music and the mission of music is,” Nelsons said. “To bring us in this world of emotions and a world of fantasy and the world of spirituality and the universe, and that’s what she does with her music.”