София Губайдулина

Independence cost her the centre of Soviet musical life and gained her everything else. Gubaidulina worked for years at the margins of it, earning a living partly from film music and exploring free improvisation with the ensemble Astreja, and she took Shostakovich's advice to continue along what he called her mistaken path for the permission it plainly was. Born at Chistopol in the Tatar republic in 1931 and brought up in Kazan, she studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory and then in Moscow with Nikolai Peiko and Vissarion Shebalin. Offertorium, the violin concerto written for Gidon Kremer in 1980, made her international reputation: it takes the royal theme from Bach's Musical Offering, strips it away note by note from both ends, and then rebuilds it. Sound itself is treated as a moral matter in her music — the breath of a bayan, the scrape of a bow near the bridge, silence given the weight of an event. The Hour of the Soul, De profundis, the St John Passion of 2000 and the second violin concerto In tempus praesens of 2007 mark out the range. She settled at Appen, near Hamburg, in 1992, and lived there until her death in March 2025. She finished at Kazan in 1954 and stayed in Moscow with Shebalin until 1963, and in 1979 she was named among the blacklisted Khrennikov's Seven at the composers' union congress. Astreja she founded with Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, and her film work included the animated Adventures of Mowgli. The St John Passion was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart and followed in 2002 by Johannes-Ostern for Hannover Rundfunk; she belonged to the academies of Frankfurt and Hamburg and to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.