Perhaps the nicest quotation about Sofia Gubaidulina comes from the conductor Simon Rattle: he said she was like a „flying recluse”, because she is always „in orbit and only occasionally visits terra firma. Now and then she comes to us on Earth, brings us light and then goes back into her orbit.”
Sofia Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in Chistopol in the autonomous Russian republic of Tatarstan. She studied in Kazan and at the Moscow Conservatoire and became a freelance composer in 1963. However, her works received little recognition in the Soviet Union, and their performance was even banned for a time – they did not conform with the principles of Socialist Realism that rejected abstraction of any kind. During this period Gubaidulina earned a living by writing film music.
It was Dmitri Shostakovich who encouraged her to continue on her own „mistaken path.” However, political activism was not her main concern. „It was much more of an ideological issue. It was a matter of freedom,” Gubaidulina recalls. „Without it I would not have been able to go on living as a composer. I could not write unless my soul was free. It was either/or. But it was impossible to work freely under this regime. I wasn’t dangerous, the problem wasn’t my music – that didn’t really matter. But I had this desire for freedom in my eyes.”
Gubaidulina has not had to struggle for recognition for a long time now. Her music is admired by conductors such as Christian Thielemann and Simon Rattle and is performed by orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. The online magazine Bachtrack recently named her the world’s most-performed composer. Prizes she has been awarded include the Swedish Polar Music Prize and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale; in Germany she has been awarded the Federal Republic’s Order of Merit. She has also been presented with the Golden Lion at the Music Biennale in Venice and the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.
Gubaidulina’s works almost always revolve around a central theme of her life, her faith. „I cannot imagine any art that does not appeal to Heaven, to perfection, to the absolute,” is how she once described her musical philosophy. She was baptised into the Russian Orthodox church in 1970. Her loyalty to the divine shapes all her work and is manifest in the titles of many of the pieces. This was already clear with her first violin concerto Offertorium, which she wrote in 1981 at the age of fifty for Gidon Kremer and brought about her international breakthrough.
Gubaidulina’s special fondness for sombre, deep tone colours is evident in works such as her Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings (1975), and in On the Edge of the Abyss (2003) for seven cellos and two waterphones, whose sound is reminiscent of whale song. This piece also typifies Gubaidulina’s interest in a range of instruments that transcends those used in a conventional orchestra: the composer possesses a whole collection of instruments from beyond Europe and makes regular use of these in her works. Despite all the recognition she has received and her personal success, Gubaidulina takes a more pessimistic view of the present. This was one of the reasons why she wrote the oratorio On Love and Hatred, which received its world premiere in Tallinn in 2016 and is considered to be her opus summum. To take love to places ruled by hatred – is how she once described what she wanted her art to achieve.
Sofia Gubaidulina moved to Germany in 1992 and settled in a small village northwest of Hamburg. One of her neighbours was the Russian composer Viktor Suslin, with whom she had founded an improvisation group on the 1970s and who died in 2012. Sofia Gubaidulina died in 2025 at the age of 93.
As of December 2025