Pioneering Russia-born composer Sofia Gubaidulina has passed away in Appen at the age of 93. Composer Sergej Newski reflects on her unique role in the history of music.

The scale of Gubaidulina's personality renders the task of describing her creative output in just a few words impossible, but there are some storylines which thread through both her life and music which capture something of her essence.

At the centre of everything there is the sacred. Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025) was the granddaughter of a progressive mullah and the daughter of a geodesic engineer from Chistopol in Tatarstan, an autonomous republic within Russia, mostly populated by Tatars. She had her first religious experience at the age of five when on a family holiday she saw an icon of the Saviour in a little peasant cottage in the countryside. But religiosity in her music was never tied to any particular tradition. In fact, the key to understanding the religious cradle from which her music grew is Johann Sebastian Bach, and her entire creative biography is a conscious dialogue with him, from her early Chaconne for piano composed in 1962 to the St. John Passion written in 2000 to coincide with the turn of the new millennium. Throughout her life Gubaidulina has either turned to musical genres and forms invented by Bach, such as the instrumental mass in the Introitus, or she has simply quoted him. Thus, in Offertorium (1980) for violin and orchestra, a quotation from Bach's ´The Musical Offering´ runs through the refrain, inspiring the soloist's improvisation.

There are several reasons for this constant identification with Bach's legacy. In Western Europe in the 1960s, love of Bach's music was a sign of that you belonged to a high kind of pop culture. In the view of educated people at the time, Bach was a pop star whose music was continuously performed by other pop stars, from Glenn Gould (1932-1982) to the Swingle Singers and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and it was even perceived as background music at parties (Russian-American writer Alexander Genis, among others wrote about this perception of Bach). But at that time for most composers living behind the Iron Curtain Bach was not a historical figure, he was a superhero who wrote only for the Almighty and ignored his surrounding society. As Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote at almost the same time as Gubaidulina´s Chaconne: “In every music there is Bach, in every one of us there is God,”. Gubaidulina's Soviet colleagues and contemporaries from Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) to Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) and Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) were tempted to try out this image of the artist as a recluse appealing to eternity and creating outside of time and environment, but only Gubaidulina convincingly carried it through her entire life and, surprisingly, this image in a sense became her essence and did not contradict her worldly success.

In the end, Gubaidulina's appeal to baroque forms and to the tradition of European religious music had another purpose: it restored the connection with European culture that had been lost during the years of Stalin's isolation and at the same time renewed a dialogue on equal terms with her contemporaries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Thus, in her Offertorium for violin and orchestra, not only Bach, but also Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) is quoted. Webern’s orchestration of the ‘royal theme’ from The Musical Offering is reinterpreted by Gubaidulina in her own way.

In the 1990s, with the opening of borders, this image of an ideal timeless European culture as a model for imitation was either lost or held hostage to conservative discourse about “the Europe we lost,” but in Gubaidulina's case it has strangely retained a certain authenticity and sincerity, perhaps because she was instantly transported from one relative isolation – the late USSR – to another, the world of the small town of Appen in Schleswig-Holstein, where she settled in 1991 and lived for the rest of her life. At the same time, the range of themes and authors she turned to in the 1990s after her move to Germany testifies to her keen and discerning interest in the German culture which surrounded her: such as her vocal cycles with texts by Elsa Lasker-Schüler and Christian Morgenstern. And the delicate choral cycle on Russian poet Gennadiy Aygi's poems ‘jetzt immer schnee’ (1993) also demonstrates her willingness to share the untranslatable complexity and fragility of her own cultural experience with new audiences.

The second major theme in Gubaidulina's work can be defined as a view of musical time through the prism of performing gesture. Her musical speech often consists of individual exclamations and motifs linked together by breathing and pauses. While the notation in most of her pieces is fixed, behind the syntax of her music one can hear the experience of a performer experiencing sound as a result of bodily tension. Sofia Gubaidulina belonged to a rather rare type of composer-improviser. In 1975, together with Vyacheslav Artyomov (b. 1940) and Viktor Suslin (1942-2012), she created the unique improvisation ensemble Astraea – the only similar group in Europe that comes to mind is the Italian group Nuova Consonanza, which included Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) among others. All music in the 1960s and 1970s struggled with an insoluble task: how to fix the unfixable? The aura, spontaneity and freedom of the performer resisted being transferred to the sheet music, and Gubaidulina's scores show how she successfully endeavoured to combine the discipline of structural thinking with the spontaneity and freedom of the improviser. In a 1989 film interview with Gubaidulina, there is a long panorama showing the interiors in her flat filled with numerous exotic string and percussion instruments. She played most of them brilliantly: composer Leonid Bobylev (1949-2025) a colleague of hers from the Moscow Conservatory talks of how one day, sitting on a luxurious Turkish carpet, Gubaidulina strummed the strings of a balalaika and lamented: “What a poor instrument, though, Lenya!”. At the same time, the bayan, another member of the Russian folk ensemble entered the permanent toolkit of the European musical avant-garde thanks to Gubaidulina. Her timbre ear and the originality of certain decisions in instrumentation still impresses with the sharpness and precision of her choices. This is especially true of the percussion - the sumptuous score of the music for the Soviet animated cartoon Mowgli is on many people's lips.

In 1988 Gubaidulina persuaded Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-1990), who was sympathetic to his Soviet colleagues, to give Mark Pekarsky's (1940-2005) ensemble a whole mini-orchestra of rare percussion instruments not available in the USSR, and then together with her colleagues she thanked him with a collective composition ‘Signor Luigi's Magic Gift’.

Finally, the last important quality without which it is impossible to understand Gubaidulina's music is her awareness of herself as belonging to several different cultures, a quality that was once defined as universal responsiveness. She once said in an interview that she felt part of at least three traditions: Tatar, Russian and Jewish. On the one hand, this openness of Gubaidulina to the latest trends of the European avant-garde as to Russian melos or Eastern archaics corresponds to her chosen modus operandi of an artist-hermit independent of local context, emphasising her exterritoriality. On the other hand, this same existence above geographical and cultural boundaries turned her into an artist-membrane, responsive to various impulses and combining them in new and unexpected contexts. Today, after the passing of Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, this transboundary nature of her music and her ability to incorporate elements of the most diverse cultures suddenly turns out to be a decisive factor that provides a key to understanding her work. The mourning of her passing brought together people from different cultural contexts, and its universal character is the best testimony to the magnitude of this exceptional talent.