When the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, began to include overtly religious ideas in her concert music, it proved a provocative step to take in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union of the late 1960s. These ideas were expressed through titles and a kind of dramaturgy that she called “instrumental symbolism”. Switching from one instrument to another, or between different parts of the same instrument, she suggested extra-musical and even theological ideas, rather like an acoustic equivalent of the geometrical distortions and symbolism familiar from the icons of the Eastern Orthodox church that she loved so much.
With works such as Introitus (1978) for piano and chamber orchestra and In Croce (1979) for cello and organ, she acquired a reputation in the world of non-official Soviet culture, inspiring for enthusiasts but irritating to the old guard of the Composers’ Union. She refused to be intimidated.
The violinist Gidon Kremer took the concerto Offertorium (1980) to orchestras abroad, and Gubaidulina’s music began to feature in concerts and festivals around the globe. Commissions followed, such as Alleluia (1990), for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and and vocal forces conducted by Simon Rattle; the Viola Concerto (1996), for Yuri Bashmet and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and the violin concerto In Tempus Praesens (2007), for Anne-Sophie Mutter.
In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina moved to Appen, a village outside Hamburg, in Germany, seeking the peace and quiet that seemed to have gone from Moscow. There she spent the last three decades of her life, composing in every medium that fascinated her, from vast oratorios to the tiniest pieces for solo double bass or unaccompanied voice. As she grew older, her deep and emotional mysticism, rooted in her passionately held religious convictions, became ever more concentrated and fiercely eschatological – concerned with the end of history and the world – in tone.
However, in every piece she always seemed to begin anew. She delighted in treating every new day of her life as an opportunity to search for something fresh and undiscovered and she was never afraid to take artistic risks, as with In the Shadow of the Tree (1998) for Japanese solo instruments and orchestra, and The Wrath of God (2019), for orchestra.
Gubaidulina’s music reflects and embodies her unquenchable lifelong devotion to artistic freedom: not merely the freedom of composers to write what they write, but the freedom of performers to play what they play (“in joy”, as she used to put it, with a childlike smile), and the freedom of every listener to hear what they hear, and not what someone else has told them to hear.
Born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the USSR, midway between Moscow and Kazakhstan, Sofia was the youngest of three sisters. She grew up in the Tatar capital of Kazan, on the river Volga. Her mother, Fedosia (nee Elkhova), was a schoolteacher of mixed Russian-Polish heritage, and her father, Asgad Gubaidulin, a land surveyor, from a Tatar family. Both were strong supporters of the communist order and Soviet values.
Sofia was especially devoted to her father, though he could accept neither her choice of career nor her religious beliefs. She recalled him talking quietly in the Tatar language with his friends (she never learned it, as the family spoke Russian), and of accompanying him into the countryside on his work where his long silences, she said, “taught me how to listen”.
Gubaidulina’s elder sisters were musical and there was a small grand piano at home. When her own lessons began, she made swift progress. Disliking “the impoverished little pieces” she was given to study, she quickly taught herself to improvise, a skill that remained of lifelong importance; relief came when her teacher introduced her to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
The household was atheist, but while still small, she saw an icon in someone’s home – “and I recognised God”. She was proud that her paternal grandfather, Masgud Gubaidulin, had been a mullah and she kept on her desk a photograph of him in his turban, though she had no memories of meeting him.
After five years of undergraduate study at the Kazan Conservatory, in 1954 she moved to the postgraduate course at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where her teachers included Nikolai Peiko and Vissarion Shebalin, both unusual composers.
On one occasion, when one of her examiners publicly criticised her “mistaken path”, another, Dmitri Shostakovich, quietly told her to “continue on your mistaken path”. She was admitted to the Union of Soviet Composers in 1961 and finished graduate studies two years later.
At the tail end of the Khrushchev thaw, Moscow was a cauldron of new artistic ideas. With her contemporaries, who included the composers Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, from Estonia, and Valentin Silvestrov, from Ukraine, she was fascinated by everything she could lay her hands on from the musical and intellectual world beyond: “In the west, information and recordings and scores were easy to come by, so you could take it for granted you would always find it later. But for us every scrap of information was precious, so we threw ourselves on it hungrily.”
Most inspiring for her were her encounters with European religious music of various kinds, and her first impressions of 20th-century modernism, whether in the form of Webern, Berg and Stravinsky, or the later “avant-garde” generation of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis. Through a friend she also discovered the instruments and sounds of various indigenous cultures, especially those of the far east of the USSR. Even from early on there were hints of what was to come: a certain purity of sound and a fondness for ecstatic incantation.
The Soviet Union supported a huge cinema industry, which provided employment for composers. Gubaidulina’s output of movie music was prolific. She worked at enormous speed, noting: “I write film music for six months, take a month off to recover my health and then write my own music for the rest of the year.” Though she scored many kinds of films, ranging from the teen drama Chuchelo (Scarecrow, 1984) to The Cat That Walked By Herself (1988), she was especially proud of her music for children’s cartoons.
Film music was not subject to the same political controls as concert music and popular music, and proved a good place to experiment and learn discipline.
Of her encourager Shostakovich she observed: “He could make the deepest darkness shine with the brightest light!” The same could be said of the music with which she found her distinctive voice. I first met her after arriving as a graduate student in Moscow in 1984, at a concert of electronic music where her Vivente – Non Vivente (Alive and Dead, 1970) was played. She was immediately open and warm.
In 1956 she married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, and they had a daughter, Nadezhda. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her second, to the mystic and dissident Nikolai, later Nicolas, Bokov. In the 90s she married the pianist and theorist Pyotr Meshchaninov. He died in 2006; Nadezhda had died two years earlier. Gubaidulina is survived by two grandchildren.
• Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, composer, born 24 October 1931; died 13 March 2025
