A PORTRAIT OF SOFIA GUBAIDULINA

Text: Simon Chlosta, 22 February 2024

Translation: Alison Hindley

Perhaps the nicest quote about Sofia Gubaidulina comes from conductor Simon Rattle: she is like a »flying recluse« because she is always »in orbit and only occasionally visits terra firma. Now and then, she comes to us on the earth and brings us light and then goes back into her orbit.« Anyone who ever meets the now 92-year-old composer gets a sense of what Rattle might have meant: Gubaidulina seems to live in her own world; a profound aura surrounds her as only very great artists have. At the same time, she appears unapproachable, almost shy. It is really hard to believe that these kinds of sound emerge from the ideas of this petite person. Her works are often sombre and monumental, demanding a huge orchestra – overpowering music in the best sense.

The 2024 Hamburg International Music Festival is dedicating a special spotlight to Sofia Gubaidulina – with top-class chamber music programmes and big orchestral concerts.

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in Chistopol in the autonomous Russian Republic of Tatarstan. She studied in Kazan and at the Moscow Conservatory and has worked as a freelance composer since 1963. In the Soviet Union, her works rarely attracted any interest however and were temporarily given a performance ban – they did not comply with the stipulations of socialist realism, which rejected any form of abstraction. During this time, Gubaidulina earned her living from film music, amongst other things.

It was Dmitri Shostakovich who encouraged her to continue on her »mistaken path«. Political activism was not paramount for her, however. »It was in fact an ideological issue. It concerned the issue of freedom«, she explained in an interview four years ago. »Without it, I would not have survived as a composer, I could not have written without a free soul. There was just an either/or. But a free occupation was not possible in this regime. I was not dangerous, my music was not the problem, it did not really matter. But the desire for freedom was in my eyes.«

It has been a long time since Gubaidulina has no longer had to fight for recognition. Her music is admired by conductors such as Christian Thielemann and even Simon Rattle and performed by orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The online magazine »Bachtrack« just recently selected her as the most played composer in the world. Yet, even regardless of gender, she is one of the most revered classical music-makers. She has been awarded prizes such as Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale; in Germany, she received the Federal Cross of Merit. However, you really have to search for her trophies in her living room. If you ask her about them, her eyes nevertheless start to light up. She proudly shows her visitors the Golden Lion from the Venice Music Biennale and the Gold Medal from London’s Royal Philharmonic Society.

The composer has been living in a house surrounded by trees in Appen, a small municipality northwest of Hamburg, since 1992. Her neighbour was the Russian composer Viktor Suslin, who died in 2012. With him, she founded an improvisation group in the 1970s. His widow, the piano teacher Julia Suslin, still lives there today. Gubaidulina herself was married three times; her daughter, commemorated by a picture in the living room, already passed away several years ago.

Gubaidulina chose Appen primarily due to its proximity to her publisher Sikorski – and because this remote spot gives her the necessary freedom and tranquillity for her work. »I need stillness and solitude«, the composer says. She describes the »disengagement from everyday life« as the most important prerequisite. »Only when you manage to step out of everyday life can you reach the imaginary.« Her compositions thereby emerge solely at her desk. She only settles at her piano, which Mstislav Rostropovich once gave her as a gift, »when time allows«. Apart from that, Gubaidulina, who also speaks German, only unwillingly comments about her music - especially not during the composition process in which she, in her own declaration, sacrifices herself completely for the work – just no distraction!

Nevertheless, a lot has been said and written about her music. She is »highbrow but without this ever being in the foreground«, Anne-Sophie Mutter said for instance. Gubaidulina dedicated her Second Violin Concerto »In tempus praesens« from 2007 to Mutter – and thereby firstly alluded to the mathematical concepts which she takes as the basis for her compositions and secondly to the enormous emotional impact that this music always radiates despite her intellect. Its sounds intoxicate and display a suggestive power, but are never bold. And although the creator usually draws on traditional forms and methods of composition, her music sounds remarkably new.

Gubaidulina’s works almost always circle around the central theme of her life, her faith. »I cannot imagine any art that does not appeal to heaven, to perfection, to the ultimate«, she had once described her guiding musical principle. In 1970, she was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church. Her affinity with the divine cosmos shapes her entire creativity and manifests itself in numerous religiously inspired titles of her works. This was already the case with her First Violin Concerto »Offertorium«, which the then 50 year old wrote for Gidon Kremer in 1981 and which marked her international breakthrough. In Hamburg, you can now hear her first orchestral work, »Der Zorn Gottes« (The Wrath of God), which premiered in 2022. Here, Gubaidulina creates a musical tale of the Last Judgment with almost apocalyptic sounds.

If not directly religious, then her compositions are usually inspired by poetry. Her Third Violin Concerto, for instance, bears the title »Dialog: Ich und Du« (Dialogue: you and I) (2018) and refers to the book of the same name by Martin Buber from 1923 in which the Jewish philosopher and theologian described human relationships. Gubaidulina’s sources are, however, often much older. In the extraordinary arrangement for choir, cello and percussion, in 1997, she set to music the oldest well-known reference from Italian literature: the creation-praising »Sonnengesang« (Canticle of the Sun) by Saint Francis of Assisi from the 13th century.

Her Fourth String Quartet is also a – albeit very abstract – »musical response to the creative world« of a writer, namely T. S. Eliot. Gubaidulina translates his thoughts about »the birth of ›genuine realism‹ from ›man-made artifice‹« into distinct layers of sound, part of the quartet to be recorded on tape in advance, also complemented by projections of coloured light. The Kronos Quartet premiered this innovative synthesis of sound and light in 1993 in New York’s Carnegie Hall (and are now coming to commemorate their 50th anniversary at the Elbphilharmonie with this as well).

Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings (1975) again illustrates her special preference for darker, deep tonal colours as does the one-movement work »Am Rande des Abgrunds« (On the Brink of the Abyss) (2003) for seven cellos and two waterphones filled with water, whose sound evokes whale songs. At the same time, this piece typifies Gubaidulina’s interest in an instrument that goes beyond the traditional orchestra; the composer herself has an entire collection of non-European instruments and also routinely draws on these in her work.