Sofia Goubaïdoulina

Sofia Gubaidulina was born on 24 October 1931 in Chistopol, in the Republic of Tatarstan in the Soviet Union. Her father, an engineer, was Tatar; her mother, a schoolteacher, was Russian. Her grandfather had been a mullah, a Muslim cleric. The family soon moved to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. As a child Sofia discovered music on a small piano and felt very early a deep link between music and the sacred, even though religion was opposed by the Soviet regime.

She studied piano and composition at the Kazan conservatory from 1949, then in 1954 entered the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied until 1963. Some teachers thought her work too modern. But in 1959, at her final exam, Dmitri Shostakovich, a member of the jury, encouraged her with words that stayed with her all her life: “I want you to continue along your own, ‘incorrect’ path.”

In the Soviet Union, composers who strayed from the official style struggled to have their music performed. To earn a living, for many years Gubaidulina wrote film scores, notably for animated films such as Mowgli. She took an interest in the Western avant-garde, known through scores circulating secretly, and in electronic music at the Moscow studio. In 1975, with the composers Vyacheslav Artyomov and Viktor Suslin, she founded the group Astreia, which improvised on traditional Russian, Caucasian and Asian instruments.

Deeply religious — she converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1970 — she saw music as a way of linking humanity to the divine. The Latin word religio, she recalled, means “to bind”. Her works often bear spiritual titles. She composed many works for the bayan, a Russian accordion, which she helped bring into classical music, notably De profundis (1978), in which the instrument seems to breathe. In 1979 she was blacklisted by the Union of Soviet Composers, making her premieres even harder in the USSR.

Her music nonetheless began to be played abroad. In 1980 she composed for the violinist Gidon Kremer the concerto Offertorium, built on the royal theme from Bach’s Musical Offering, which gradually unravels and is then rebuilt backwards. Kremer played it all over the world, making her known internationally. In 1982 she composed Seven Words for cello, bayan and strings. She often used numbers, such as the Fibonacci sequence, to build the form of her works.

In 1992, after the end of the Soviet Union, she settled in Germany, at Appen near Hamburg, where she lived for the rest of her life, surrounded by her cats. She received many commissions from the greatest orchestras and performers. In 2000, for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, she composed a St John Passion. In 2007 she wrote In tempus praesens, a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter. She also composed works for orchestra and chorus, such as The Canticle of the Sun, dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich.

She received many international honours, including the Polar Music Prize in 2002 and the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2013. She continued composing to a great age, notably orchestral works. She died at Appen on 13 March 2025, aged ninety-three. Her intense, spiritual music, combining traditional sounds with modern exploration, makes her one of the great composers of our time.