Legendary avant-garde composer Sofia Gbaidurina passed away in Germany and spent more than 30 years of her life after the disbandment of the Soviet Union.
Gubaidulina, 93, was one of a group of composers blacklisted in the Soviet Union in 1979.
However, her work eventually reached the west, where she was plagued by the fusion of contemporary music with spiritual and religious themes.
She was born in October 1931 in Chistopol, Tatarstan, into a Russian Tatar family.
Her family soon moved to Kazan, southern Russia, where she studied music and in 1954 moved to the Conservatoire in Moscow.
The great Dmitry Shostakovic had already been fired from the Conservatoire, but his former assistant, Nikolai Peko, introduced her to the works of Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
Shostakovic quickly discovers her talent and tells her that she can follow her “false path,” but that seems misguided.
Gbaidurina’s composition was condemned by the Soviet system, and her works were banned in the 1960s and 1970s.
She was one of three Russian composers, shamelessly avant-garde Russian composers, along with Schnikke and Denisov.
“We were all very different artists,” she told the BBC in 2013. “Edison Denisov was a classicist with very subtle yet strict logic. Alfred Schnitzke was romantic.
Her life changed only in the late 1970s when she happened to share a taxi with violinist Gidon Kremer in Moscow.
He suggested that she write a violin concerto, and after it was premiered by Kremer in Vienna in 1981, it was this composition, Offerthorium, that she borrowed the theme from Bach, and she gave the theme from Bach.
Schnitzke praised the work as “probably the most important violin concerto of the 20th century.”
The coalition of Soviet composers blacklisted her in 1979, accusing her and six fellow composers of writing “a pointless… noisy mud in place of musical innovation.”
She was first allowed to travel west in 1984 for a festival in Finland.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Gbaidulina moved to a modest home in a quiet village in Appen near Hamburg, northern Germany.
Conductor Simon Rattle described her as a “flying hermit,” always in orbit, and only occasionally visited Earth.
“It’s very appealing to set rules,” she once said. “They quickly become hopelessly outdated.”
