Sofia Gubaidulina
Encouraged by Shostakovich, Sofia Gubaidulina ignored criticism from Soviet authorities to become a world-renowned composer. Daniel Jaffé hears her story
Last year’s RPS Gold Medal recipient is one of the greatest composers of our age. Daniel Jaffé meets her
‘This girl scares me,’ admitted one of Sofia Gubaidulina’s teachers, Yury Shaporin. ‘She looks at me with such angry eyes.’ As a student at the Moscow Conservatoire, Gubaidulina became known for her fiery and uncompromising temperament. Speaking to the now 88-yearold composer, it’s clear that her characteristic intensity remains. During our interview, in the bar room of a Kensington Hotel, she speaks with the seriousness of someone deeply engaged with her art and faith, both profoundly intertwined with and sorely tested by the Soviet regime in which she started her career.
For all her years living outside Russia – she left Moscow and settled near Hamburg in Germany in 1992 – she is obviously far from home in the impersonal glitter of this venue. But this London trip is an important one: Gubaidulina has been awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal, one of music’s highest honours. Growing up, she upset even her most admiring teachers by her refusal to play the most basic political games that composers often need to play to succeed anywhere – let alone the USSR. By some miracle, Gubaidulina has both survived and thrived.
Born of a Tartar father and a Russian mother, the third of three daughters, she grew up in Kazan. Under Soviet rule the Tartar city had suffered great deprivation: forced collectivisation had created severe famine, and of the city’s 60-or-so Orthodox churches, only two survived. Life was hard and largely devoid even of natural beauty. The Gubaidullins’ backyard had no room for plants of any kind. To escape these grim surroundings, she habitually looked skyward where her fertile imagination could take flight among the drifting clouds.
‘‘My father had the ability to be silent and listen, and from the beginning I fell in love with this state ’’
She also fondly remembers walks with her father when she was about seven. A surveyor by profession, Asgad Gubaidulinn allowed his daughter to accompany him on work trips to the countryside. ‘As an oriental man, my father had the ability to be silent and listen,’ she tells me; ‘from the very beginning I fell in love with this state that is not based on conversation, or on action. I’m very grateful for this silent “communion” I had with my father during those walks.’ Years later, finding her own voice as a composer, that quality of silence returned when she realised that rather than writing ballets and symphonies she needed ‘to write miniatures, miniatures in a whisper’.
Another haven was Kazan’s Children’s
Music School, where she learned ‘to love Bach, Mozart and Beethoven’, and ‘the seed of purity and dedication to art in the hearts of future musicians’ was instilled and nurtured. Her father saved enough to buy a baby grand piano (cheaper than an upright, since most flats were too small to accommodate anything larger). That piano became Sofia’s gateway to discovering her talent for composing: ‘It was my first and most essential contact with a musical instrument, intensified by the uninteresting environment in which I lived. It became the only thing which truly inspired me in my childhood, and my whole future was built upon this experience and this relationship.’
She talks of the piano as if it were a companion – like another child might speak of a favourite toy. With a baby grand the strings were immediately accessible to an inquisitive child. ‘It was possible to play with the strings, not just the keyboard. And in a child’s consciousness, there is no boundary between strings and keys – and a child’s improvisations are completely innocent, without preconceptions. This was the beginning of an interest which later became a much more conscious activity.’
That ‘more conscious activity’ began in the mid-1970s with Viktor Suslin – a fellow former composition student – and Vyacheslav Artyomov, who regularly returned from excursions to Central Asia and the Transcaucasus with non-western folk instruments. One day late in 1975, Gubaidulina and Suslin joined Artyomov on the floor of his suburban Moscow apartment to improvise on some of those instruments. So delighted were they with the fresh, unusual sounds that they decided to meet regularly.
For Gubaidulina, it was a continuation of her childhood experiments, as they discovered several unorthodox ways of producing sound, whether by striking the body of a dutar or making a bayan ‘breathe’ rather than play. They also invented instruments, such as ‘friction rods’ (rubber balls threaded on a metal rod) which Gubaidulina used some 18 years later for her Fourth String Quartet. They made several public appearances as a novelty act in concerts of early music, jazz and folk before adopting the name by which they are remembered: Astraea (see left).
Though not an ostentatious type, Gubaidulina had already drawn attention from senior figures in Soviet music. Some were positive, such as Shostakovich, who after hearing Gubaidulina’s student symphony told her, ‘Don’t be afraid to be yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect way.’
Less fortunate were her relations with the top officials of Soviet music. In 1970 the head of the Soviet Composers’ Union, Tikhon Khrennikov, was seen on a tour of Germany roaring with laughter about Gubaidulina and her music. As her horrified publisher Jürgen Köchel recalled afterwards: ‘Intellectually
she was head and shoulders above these men, but they found her art a source of nothing but ridicule.’ Matters became worse when Gubaidulina and other avant garde composers had their works performed abroad. In 1979, in Brezhnev’s presence, Khrennikov lambasted them for the temerity of having their music represent Soviet art. Those composers – soon widely known as the ‘Khrennikov Seven’ – had their music removed from scheduled concerts, and Gubaidulina found even her father, a loyal communist, denouncing her.
Fortunately, Gubaidulina had previously been asked to write a concerto by the maverick Soviet violinist Gidon Kremer. A star in Western Europe, Kremer had been hailed by Herbert von Karajan as ‘the world’s greatest violinist’. Gubaidulina responded enthusiastically, admiring Kremer’s tone which she described in terms echoing her own early tactile piano experiments. ‘In this union of the tip of the finger and the resonating string lies the total surrender of the self to the tone. And I began to understand that Kremer’s theme is sacrifice – the musician’s sacrifice of himself in self-surrender to the tone.’
In Offertorium, Gubaidulina’s enduring love for Bach – her concerto being based on the theme in his Musical Offering – is united with all her experience in drawing the most extraordinary colours from various instruments. First completed in 1980 (subsequently much revised), the score was smuggled out of the
USSR to Kremer, who gave its premiere in the following year in Vienna. The work effectively launched her international reputation. Such was its acclaim and evident quality that it was finally performed in Russia, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, on 15 April 1982.
Today a truly international figure, with works commissioned and championed by performers such as Kurt Masur, Simon Rattle, Anne-sophie Mutter and the Kronos Quartet, Gubaidulina joins a distinguished roster of composers including Brahms, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich and Lutos awski, in receiving the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal. It is also the first time the medal has been awarded to a female composer. What matters more to Gubaidulina, though, is the honour in receiving such an award from a body with a strong historic tie to one of her musical heroes, Beethoven.
She describes Beethoven, alongside Bach, as a creative genius who had a quality she believes essential for any serious composer today: ‘I think for the sake of the serious development of humanity, the pursuit of composing profound classical music is most important – more important than writing poetry, literature or any occupation in the sphere of technology and science. No other occupation is involved with the material of sounds which have existed since the creation of the world.’
She cites Nietzsche, bringing to my mind that transcendental composer who believed in music’s redemptive powers: Scriabin. She eagerly accepts the comparison, adding, ‘The attempt to connect the cosmic with the human goes back at least 2,500 years – think of Sophocles and Pericles.’ She ends with a warning: ‘There are so many difficulties caused by humanity’s progress, and to overcome them, today’s composers need not only talent, not only to be hardworking as before: you need a particular strength of spirit – a strong inner fire.’
Thanks to Hans-ulrich Duffek and Viktoria Zora for translating Sofia Gubaidulina’s spoken words