Sofia Gubaidulina

Born October 24, 1931

Listening to the intensely chromatic compositions of Sofia Gubaidulina can be challenging. You wouldn’t put her music on to relax or to be energized. As with any avant-garde work, taking it in can feel like work.

And yet, Gubaidulina is widely considered one of the most important Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century. The composer Ellen Reid recently wrote that “Sofia Gubaidulina’s music speaks to my soul. Her compositional palette is expansive — muscular and delicate, psychological and spiritual.”

Born 90 years ago in the remote Tatar town of Chistopol, Gubaidulina enrolled as a small child in music school in Kazan, capital of the Tatar Republic. What was it about her that made her head (or her heart?) a wellspring of music that compelled the great Shostakovich to tell the twenty-year-old Sofia: “I would wish for you to continue down your ‘incorrect’ path”? He said this knowing full well that, in the Soviet Union, going down any “incorrect” path – be it a literary, artistic, or musical path – was very, very difficult. After all, his own groundbreaking compositions had made him the target of several waves of persecution and attacks.

The art historian Igor Golomstock, author of the book Totalitarian Art, was among the first to clearly describe a lamentable pattern. Whenever there’s a revolution, anyone doing revolutionary things in the arts tends to welcome it with open arms.

We can point to Soviet painters, poets, musicians, and actors from the 1920s – people like Mayakovsky, Shostakovich, and Meyerhold – who thought, for a while at least, that this new force taking over, which had broken and destroyed the old power structures and the old economic relations, would create a world in which they would feel at home, a world free of the old, outdated, and decrepit culture that they were tossing overboard “from the steamship of modernity.”

With what enthusiasm, they painted their avant-garde pictures, wrote their futuristic poetry, staged their plays with novel constructivist sets, and composed music that sounded absolutely jarring to ears attuned to past harmonies. By the 1920s, however, there were already increasingly loud voices condemning this “outlandishness” as incomprehensible to workers and peasants, and proclaiming that proletarian art should be simple and clear. For a while, this criticism was dismissed as a vestige of the struggle between old and new. Surely the new would triumph!

As part of his quest for a new artistic language, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky created his “ROSTA Windows” (Окна РОСТА), and many outstanding artists decorated the city for revolutionary holidays and took part in “monumental propaganda” programs designed to extol the revolution. By 1918, Vsevolod Meyerhold was staging Mayakovsky’s thoroughly formalist play, Mystery-Bouffe, featuring set designs by the father of suprematism, Kazimir Malevich. In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, revolutionary art was flourishing.

But as the thirties approached, life for the formalists became increasingly difficult. Stalin had no more need for tumultuous artistic innovation than he did for a political opposition.

In the early thirties, a number of arts unions were formed: the Union of Writers, the Union of Artists, the Union of Composers. “Excellent!” many proclaimed, believing that unions would put an end to the struggle between Bolshevik artists and poputchiki (fellow travelers), who were tolerated, but subjected to harsh criticism. Now the arts world would be organized into one big happy family.

But there was a catch. While in the twenties it had still been possible to create whatever art you wanted – you might be harassed and intimidated, but at least you could express yourself through your work – by the thirties you could only work as a composer if you belonged to the Union of Composers, and not just anyone was admitted.

The idea of socialist realism, which was enthusiastically described by the writer Maxim Gorky at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, was quickly transformed into a bludgeon used to batter wayward writers, artists, and composers. Socialist realism was supposedly designed to reflect reality, so formalist fads were seen as blurring what should have been a clear picture. Furthermore, this realism was “socialist,” meaning it had to show reality in a revolutionary spirit. Portraying life under socialism in any but the most cheerful colors was out of the question.

These two sides of official culture – the rejection of experimental artistic forms and the requirement of a whitewashed reality – left no space in which the avant-garde could function. As a result, some artists died in obscurity (like Malevich), others reconciled themselves to their fate and toed the new line, like Pyotr Konchalovsky, who transformed himself from an avant-garde rapscallion (in 1909, he had been one of the founding members of the irreverent Jack of Diamonds modern art group) into the official patriarch of Soviet painting. A few, like Mayakovsky, put a bullet in their head, while some simply endured scathing defamation and intimidation. “Muddle Instead of Music” was the title of an infamous article published in Pravda in 1936 attacking Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, when Gubaidulina was just five years old. No doubt it was explained to her at her music school and later at the conservatory what an awful thing such strange, amelodic, and ominous-sounding music as Lady Macbeth was.

Fortunately for Gubaidulina, she came up as a composer in the kinder, gentler (compared to the Stalin era) sixties and seventies. The official line had not changed: socialist realism still reigned supreme, but there was a little more wiggle room. For example, Gubaidulina was able to spend time experimenting with a synthesizer in the electronic music studio set up in the basement of the Moscow apartment building that had been home to the composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin (the apartment houses a small Scriabin Museum). By the 1970s, young composers could get away with their innovations under the guise of “experimentation.” To make a living, Gubaidulina, like her fellow young Soviet nonconformist composers Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, composed film soundtracks.

However, like all Soviet avant-garde artists, Gubaidulina did not have an easy time of it. The head of the Union of Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, was not a bad composer, but his inoffensive works were in a different league compared to those of Gubaidulina, Denisov, and other less conventional Soviet composers. Perhaps he knew that, and it infuriated him, or maybe their music was simply loathsome to him. Then again, Khrennikov might have just been following an order when, in 1979, he unleashed scathing criticism on several young composers, including Gubaidulina. It signaled an end to their ability to reach a wide audience.

Of course, composers have it easier than film directors: they don’t need actors or a theater; they can pick up a sheet of music paper and write down what they hear in their head. But what is it like to compose when you know that nobody will hear what you’re writing, beyond the audiences that can fit in a small auditorium? It is therefore easy to understand why Gubaidulina has spent the past 30 years in Germany, even though there are no longer any obstacles to performing her music in Russia.

She says that she does not consider herself an exile, and she often returns to Russia to take part in the musical life of her native Tatarstan, but she has not moved back. Maybe it is because of the basic comforts that life in Germany holds for an elderly woman in less than perfect health. And her forest cottage may lend itself to her work as a composer.

You might say that Gubaidulina’s work so transcends any national style, and features such a blend of Western and Eastern influences, that it is addressed to all people to such an extent that it makes no difference where this creator of haunting, otherworldly music makes her home.

Still, it is sad to see Russia lose yet such an amazing artist.