At 93 he has left us the most unique composer of what was the generation after Shostakóvich. A generation that raised his voice against official socialist realism and that managed to see its end. Sofia Gubaidulina has died this Thursday, March 13, at her Hamburg house. He was born in 1931 in the city of Chístopol, an origin of which she always made a flag as a crossing of cultural references between the East and West. In the fifties, after Stalin’s death in 1953, Gubaidulina was noticed with friends and comrades of the Moscow Conservatory, colleagues such as Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov or Arvo Pärt. With them he made a tour that led them from the complacent look of Shostakovich to the European Atonal avant -garde, which barely glimpsed the fissures of censorship. Soon each one would follow their own paths and that of gubaidulin would be one of the most rigorous: ethnic influences, a deep religious feeling and a complete rebellion against the suffocating atmosphere of the Stalinist esterors. Finally, when the end of the Soviet regime arrived, the group became the renovated image of Perestroika in music.
Sofia Gubaidulina was not the first composer of the Soviet Union; It would be necessary to point to Elena Firsova and Galina Ustvolskaya who had opened that path. The latter was a direct student of Shostakóvich and the bad languages have suggested that perhaps something else, it was considered the most independent and eccentric of Leningrad’s composers. One of the paradoxes of the Soviet regime is that, despite the control of distressing times, they provided an example of integration of women in the composition that the West took a long time to continue.
When gubaidulina and his companions made themselves known in the West in the 1980s, there was a wave of solidarity and astonishment. They were happy times in which Russia seemed to suddenly become a reliable country and with some artistic mysteries of which a fresh aroma, a mixture of novelty and robust popular and ethnic roots, emanated, without ignoring the spiritual aroma, but without dogmas, in the manner of the filmmaker Andréi Tarkovski.
In the center of such novelty, the status of a woman composer of gubaidulin, one of the first of that size, became, in fact, an extra that further refreshed the message. It soon became the center of numerous attention, orders, premieres and considerations. In 1992 he moved to Hamburg, where he lived until his recent death. There is the Sikorski publishing house, which welcomed, and still continues to do so, to the creators of the extinct Soviet area.
Gubaidulina has protected some of the best performers, such as Violinists Guidon Kremer and Anne Sophie Mutter; Directors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Kurt Masur or Valery Gergiev. And the chapter of awards granted is extensive: Japan, Denmark, Sweden, France or Germany are countries to which Spain joined with the distinction of the BBVA Border Composition Award in 2017. His entry into the Wikipedia, with those recognition so rare that he does, has placed him among the 100 most interpreted living composers in the world since 2014, and since 2022 This list, being the seventh in global terms.
And it is fair to recognize that Spain, apart from the aforementioned award, has recognized gubaidulin in innumerable programs, among which the White Carta granted by the National Orchestra of Spain in 2009 stands out, with a program of five concerts, a personal meeting with the composer, as well as a book of excellent bill. Surely gubaidulina will rest in peace, in this murky moment in which her country again offers raised behaviors, so far from the promises of Perestroika that she embodied in music.