Outstanding women composers. From Boulanger to Pakhmutova
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Composition, like many other creative professions, is traditionally considered the privilege of the “strong half of humanity.” However, at all times there were gifted female musicians who did not agree with this state of affairs. They boldly defended their right to creativity and often achieved great success in the composing field.
One of the most famous female composers is probably Clara Schumann (1819-1896), née Wieck, wife of Robert Schumann. Since childhood, Clara has demonstrated extraordinary abilities in playing the piano and composing. Her professional growth was facilitated by her father, a talented teacher who personally taught the child prodigy. Clara met Schumann when he also began taking piano lessons from her father. Friedrich Wieck prevented his daughter from marrying a financially “unreliable” composer, and only through the court did Schumann manage to get permission to get married. After Clara became Schumann's wife, she began to pay more attention to composition. From her pen comes many piano and other pieces in which the influence of Schumann and other romantic composers - Mendelssohn, Chopin is felt. The concert will feature one work by Clara Schumann - Romance for violin and piano in A major op. 23.
Lily Boulanger (1893-1918), the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, the famous pianist and teacher, lived very little - twenty-four years. The Boulanger sisters grew up in a musical family: their father taught vocals at the Paris Conservatory, and their mother, Russian princess Raisa Myshetskaya, was a singer. Lily's musical talent was discovered very early: she learned to play notes faster than to read. In 1913, Lily graduated from the Paris Conservatory, and in the same year she was awarded the Rome Prize for the cantata “Faust and Helena”. Thus, Lily Boulanger became the first female composer to receive this prestigious award (before her, such authors as Berlioz, Gounod, Massenet, and Debussy were winners of the award). Lily was a versatile composer: she wrote instrumental, vocal, choral, and sacred music. The concert will feature a performance of her Nocturne for cello and piano - a light and subtle work with a slight oriental “tint”.
The program included a composition by another French composer, Louise Farranc (1804-1875). Her biography is connected with many famous figures in the world of music of that time: Farrank's mentors were Antonin Reich, Ignaz Moscheles, Johann Hummel. Louise was good at large-scale forms: she wrote no less than three symphonies. Her music was appreciated by Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin, and Liszt. In addition to her composer and teaching activities (Farranc taught at the Paris Conservatory), she also acted as a musical educator, compiling a multi-volume anthology of piano music. The concert will feature two movements from Farranc's chamber work - Trio for flute, violin and cello.
Amy Beach (1867-1944) - representative of the North American continent. She was born in rural New Hampshire; Studied composition, harmony and counterpoint in Boston. She spent most of her life in the United States, however, making a four-year trip to Europe, during which she performed, among other things, her own works. The program included two works by Amy Beach - Romance for violin and piano in A major, op. 23 and Quintet for piano and string quartet in F sharp minor, op. 67. Both plays belong to the romantic movement, and the “pulse” of the 20th century is undoubtedly felt in them.
The Croatian aristocratic family is represented by Dora Pejacevic (1885-1923), daughter of the Ban of Croatia, Teodor Pejacevic. It is highly valued in its homeland: the Symphony in F sharp minor, written by Dora Pejačević, is considered the first modern symphony in Croatian music. She wrote quite a lot (fifty-eight) works in various genres, including chamber music, which the Piano Quartet in D minor will introduce listeners to.
Among the venerable names of composers of the past and the century before last, it is especially pleasant to see the name of our contemporary and compatriot - Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina. Not long ago, her 85th birthday was widely celebrated in Moscow. The composer has lived in Germany for many years and continues to compose and communicate with performers of her music. The list of awards and honorary titles received by Sofia Asgatovna in various countries of the world (Japan, Germany, USA, Italy, Denmark and, of course, Russia) is huge. Gubaidulina's music is distinguished by its filigree technique, a fascinating combination of intuitiveness and strict calculation, and sensual timbre coloring. The composition Allegro rustico, which will be performed in the concert, is not entirely typical for her. It is a comic play, the name of which can be deciphered as “Allegro in a rustic style.” Despite the emphasized rhythmic lapidaryness and deliberate angularity of the melody, this piece has an almost magical charm, forcing the listener to follow the course of musical thoughts from the first to the last note.
The concert will be attended by Vladlen Ovanesyants (violin), Roman Yanchishin (violin), Dmitry Usov (viola), Boris Lifanovsky (cello), Stanislav Yaroshevsky (flute), Anna Grishina (piano).
Oksana Usova
INEronica Dudarova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Obraztsova are names known not only in Russia, but also abroad. We remember the great women musicians of the 20th century.
Veronica Dudarova
Veronica Dudarova. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru
Veronica Dudarova. Photo: south-ossetia.info
Veronica Dudarova was born in Baku in 1916. In 1938, she graduated from the piano department of the music school at the Leningrad Conservatory and made an unusual decision for that time - to become a conductor. In the USSR at that time there were no women who decided to join the symphony orchestra. Veronica Dudarova became a student of two masters - Leo Ginzburg and Nikolai Anosov.
She made her debut as a conductor at the Central Children's Theater in 1944. Then she worked in the opera studio of the Moscow Conservatory.
In 1947, Veronica Dudarova became conductor of the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, and in 1960 she took over the post of chief conductor and artistic director of this ensemble. Dudarova's repertoire gradually included a huge volume of works - from Bach and Mozart to Alfred Schnittke, Mikael Tariverdiev, Sofia Gubaidulina.
In an interview, she spoke more than once about bloody rehearsals and the fact that sometimes you have to “severely achieve results.” In 1991, Dudarova organized and headed the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia. Her name is included in the Guinness Book of Records: she became the first woman in the world to work with symphony orchestras for more than 50 years.
Festival dedicated to Veronica Dudarova:
Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Gubaidulina. Photo: remusik.org
Sofia Gubaidulina. Photo: tatarstan-symphony.com
Composer Sofia (Sania) Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in Chistopol. Her father was a surveyor, her mother a primary school teacher. Soon after the birth of their daughter, the family moved to Kazan. In 1935, Sofia Gubaidulina began studying music. In 1949, she became a student at the piano department of the Kazan Conservatory. Later, the pianist decided to write music herself and entered the composition department of the Moscow Conservatory - first in the class of Yuri Shaporin, then Nikolai Peiko, and then in graduate school under the direction of Vissarion Shebalin.
Colleagues of Sofia Gubaidulina noted that already in her first works she turned to religious images. This is especially noticeable in the scores of the 1970s and 80s: “De profundis” for accordion, violin concerto “Offertorium” (“Sacrifice”), “Seven Words” for cello, accordion and strings. This was also evident in his later works - “The Passion According to John”, “Easter According to John”, “Simple Prayer”.
“My goal has always been to hear the sound of the world, the sound of my own soul and study their collision, contrast or, conversely, similarity. And the longer I walk, the clearer it becomes to me that all this time I have been searching for the sound that would correspond to the truth of my life.”
Sofia Gubaidulina
In the late 1980s, Sofia Gubaidulina became a world famous composer. Since 1991 she has lived in Germany, but often comes to Russia. Today, festivals dedicated to her are held in different countries, and the best musical groups and soloists collaborate with her.
Documentary film about Sofia Gubaidulina:
Elena Obraztsova
Elena Obraztsova. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru
Elena Obraztsova was born in 1939 in Leningrad. When the time came to enter the university, the girl chose the vocal department of the Leningrad Conservatory, although her father insisted that her daughter study radio engineering. In 1962, student Obraztsova won the All-Union Glinka Vocal Competition. Soon the young singer made her debut at the Bolshoi Theater - her first role was Marina Mnishek in Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.
The singer’s Russian repertoire also includes Marfa from the opera “Khovanshchina” by Mussorgsky, Lyubasha from “The Tsar’s Bride” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Helen Bezukhova from “War and Peace” by Sergei Prokofiev. Elena Obraztsova performed the role of the Countess in Pyotr Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades throughout her entire musical career. The singer said: “I can sing it for up to a hundred years, as long as my voice lasts. And it grows and acquires new colors".
One of the most famous roles from Obraztsova’s foreign repertoire was Carmen in Bizet’s opera. Not only Soviet, but also Spanish listeners recognized her as the best performer of this role.
Obraztsova’s partners were Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Mirella Freni. An important event in the singer’s life was her meeting with composer Georgy Sviridov: he dedicated several vocal compositions to her.
“Life Line” program with Elena Obraztsova:
Eliso Virsaladze
Eliso Virsaladze. Photo: archive.li
Eliso Virsaladze. Photo: riavrn.ru
Eliso Virsaladze was born in Tbilisi in 1942. Her teacher at school and the conservatory was her grandmother, the famous Georgian pianist Anastasia Virsaladze. In 1962, Eliso received third prize at the II International Tchaikovsky Competition. In 1966, after graduating from the Tbilisi Conservatory, she entered graduate school at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Yakov Zak.
Since 1967, Eliso Virsaladze has taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Among the graduates of her class are laureates of international competitions Boris Berezovsky, Alexey Volodin, Dmitry Kaprin.
In the pianist's repertoire, a special place is occupied by works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev. She often performs in an ensemble with cellist Natalia Gutman.
“This is an artist of great scale, perhaps the strongest female pianist today”, - this is what Svyatoslav Richter said about Virsaladze.
Today, Eliso Virsaladze performs a lot with solo and chamber programs, and often plays with orchestras. She speaks of concerts as a sacrament: “You go on stage and belong to the composer you are performing and the audience you are playing for.”.
Program “Collected Performances” and Eliso Virsaladze’s concert:
Natalia Gutman
Natalia Gutman. Photo: classicalmusicnews.ru
The future cellist was born in Kazan in 1942, and received her first cello lessons from her stepfather, Roman Sapozhnikov. Then she studied at the Central Music School at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1964, Natalia graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Galina Kozolupova, and in 1968 she completed graduate school at the Leningrad Conservatory, where her director was Mstislav Rostropovich.
Even during her conservatory years, Natalia became a laureate of several competitions, including the II International Tchaikovsky Competition. In 1967 she began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory.
“If I just move my bow professionally and think about my own things, it will be immediately audible! For me, automatic execution and indifference are a terrible failure!”- she says.
Now Natalia Gutman trains young musicians in many European cities, organizes major festivals and continues to tour.
Speech at the “December Evenings” at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts:
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As in any other field of classical art in the Western world, in the history of academic music there are countless forgotten women who deserve to be told about themselves.
Especially in the history of composing art.
Even now, as the number of notable female composers grows every year, the seasonal schedules of the most famous orchestras and the concert programs of the most famous performers rarely include works written by women.
When the work of a female composer does become the object of audience or journalistic attention, the news about this is necessarily accompanied by some sad statistics.
Here's a recent example: This season the Metropolitan Opera presented Kaija Saariaho's brilliant Love from Afar - as it turned out, the first opera written by a woman to be shown at this theater since 1903. It's a consolation that Saariaho's works - like, for example, the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Julia Wolf - are performed quite often even without such informational reasons.
Selecting a few little-known musical heroines from a large list of female names is a difficult task. The seven women we will talk about now have one thing in common - they, to one degree or another, did not fit into the world around them.
Some solely because of their own behavior, which destroyed cultural foundations, and some - through their music, for which it is impossible to find an analogue.
Louise Farranc (1804–1875)
Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she became famous in the world of European music in the 1830s and 1840s as a pianist. Moreover, the girl’s performing reputation was so high that in 1842 Farranc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory.
She held this post for the next thirty years and, despite her teaching workload, managed to prove herself as a composer. However, rather than “managed to manifest”, but “could not help but manifest.”
Farranc came from a famous dynasty of sculptors and grew up among the best people in Parisian art, so the act of creative self-expression was extremely natural for her.
Having published about fifty works during her lifetime, mostly instrumental, Madame Professor received enthusiastic reviews of her music from Berlioz and Liszt, but in her homeland Farranc was perceived as an overly un-French composer.
In France, every budding author wrote multi-hour operas, and the laconic and inspired by the music of the classical era, the works of the Parisian really went against the fashion of the time.
In vain: her best works - like the Third Symphony in G minor - to put it mildly, are not lost against the background of mastodons of that time like Mendelssohn or Schumann. And Brahms, with his attempts to translate classicism into the language of the romantic era, was ten or even twenty years ahead of Farrank.
Dora Pejacevic (1885–1923)
A representative of one of the most notable Balkan noble families, the granddaughter of one of the bans (read - governors) of Croatia and the daughter of another, Dora Pejacevic spent her childhood and youth exactly as the world pop culture usually likes to depict the life of young and carefully protected by the family of young aristocrats .
The girl grew up under the strict supervision of English governesses, had almost no contact with her peers and, in general, was raised by her parents with an eye to a further successful marriage for the family rather than a happy childhood.
But something went wrong: Dora, as a teenager, became passionate about the ideas of socialism, began to constantly conflict with her family and, as a result, at more than twenty years old, she found herself separated from the rest of the Pejacevics for the rest of her life.
This, however, only benefited her other hobby: at the dawn of the First World War, the rebellious noblewoman established herself as the most significant figure in Croatian music.
Dora's works, equally inspired by Brahms, Schumann and Strauss, sounded extremely naive by the standards of the world around her - let's say, at the time of the premiere of her old-fashioned piano concert in Berlin and Paris, they were already listening to Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring.
But if you abstract from the historical context and listen to Pejacevic’s music as a sincere declaration of love for the German romantics, then you can easily notice her expressive melodicism, high-level orchestration and careful structural work.
Amy Beach (1867–1944)
The most famous episode of Amy Beach's biography can be retold as follows. In 1885, when she was 18 years old, Amy's parents married her to a 42-year-old surgeon from Boston. The girl was already a piano virtuoso and hoped to continue her music studies and performing career, but her husband decided otherwise.
Dr. Henry Harris Audrey Beach, concerned about the status of his family and guided by the then ideas about the role of women in secular New England society, forbade his wife to study music and limited her performances as a pianist to one concert a year.
For Amy, who dreamed of concert halls and sold-out recitals, this turned out to be tantamount to tragedy. But, as often happens, tragedy gave way to triumph: Beach, although she sacrificed her performing career, began to devote herself more and more to composing and is now clearly identified by most researchers as the best American composer of the late romantic era.
Her two main works - the Gaelic Symphony published in 1896 and the piano concerto that followed three years later - are truly beautiful, even if by the standards of those years they are completely devoid of originality. The most important thing is that in Beach’s music, as one might expect, there is absolutely no place for provincialism and parochialism.
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953)
In circles of serious fans, researchers and simply lovers of American folk music, Ruth Crawford Seeger is much better known than in the world of academic music. Why?
There are two key reasons: first, she was the wife of musicologist Charles Seeger, and therefore the ancestor of the Seeger clan, a family of musicians and singers who did more to popularize American folk than anyone else.
Secondly, for the last ten years of her life she worked closely on cataloging and arranging songs recorded during numerous trips by John and Alan Lomax, the largest American folklorists and collectors of folk music.
Surprisingly, until the beginning of their life together, both Ruth and Charles Seeger were composers of an extremely modernist bent, to whose music the word “folklore” could be applied with great difficulty. In particular, the works of Ruth Crawford of the early 30s can only be compared with the works of Anton Webern - and even then only in terms of skillfully constructed dramaturgy and laconicly concentrated musical material.
But if in Webern traditions shine through every note - no matter whether it is Austrian or Renaissance music - then Seeger’s works exist as if outside tradition, outside the past and outside the future, outside America and outside the rest of the world.
Why is a composer with such an individual style still not included in the canonical modernist repertoire? Mystery.
Lily Boulanger (1893–1918)
It would seem, what kind of music could an eternally ill, deeply religious and pathologically modest French woman from high society compose at the beginning of the last century? That's right - one that could serve as a good soundtrack for Judgment Day.
Lily Boulanger's best compositions are written on religious texts such as psalms or Buddhist prayers, and are most often performed as if by an improperly tuned choir under a ragged, tuneless and loud musical accompaniment. You can’t find an analogue for this music right away - yes, it is partly similar to Stravinsky’s early works and to the especially fiery works of Honegger, but neither one nor the other reached such depths of despair and did not go into such extreme fatalism.
When a friend of the Boulanger family, composer Gabriel Fauré, discovered that three-year-old Lily had absolute pitch, her parents and older sister could hardly imagine that this gift would translate into something so unangelic.
By the way, about my sister. Nadia Boulanger turned out to be a much more significant figure in the history of music. For almost half a century - from the 20s to the 60s - Nadya was considered one of the best music teachers on the planet. Having very specific views both on music that was new at that time and on music that was literally classical, tough, uncompromising and exhausting her students with the most difficult tasks, Nadya, even for her ideological opponents, remained an example of musical intelligence of unprecedented memory and power.
Perhaps she could have become as significant a composer as she turned out to be a teacher. In any case, she started out as a composer - but, by her own admission, after Lily’s death, something broke inside Nadya. Having lived for 92 years, the older sister never reached the heights of the few works of the younger one, who died from Crohn’s disease at the age of 24.
Elizabeth Maconkey (1907–1994)
Ralph Vaughan Williams, the greatest British composer of the last century, was a passionate champion of national musical traditions. Thus, he enthusiastically reworked folk songs, wrote choral works suspiciously similar to Anglican hymns, and, with varying degrees of success, reinterpreted the work of English composers of the Renaissance.
He also taught composition at London's Royal College of Music, where his favorite student in the 1920s was a young Irish girl named Elizabeth Maconkey.
Decades later, she will tell you that it was Vaughan Williams, even though he was a traditionalist, who advised her to never listen to anyone and to focus only on her interests, tastes and thoughts when composing music.
The advice turned out to be decisive for Makonka. Her music has always remained untouched by both the global trends of the academic avant-garde and the eternal English-Celtic love for rural folklore. It was during her student years that she discovered Béla Bartók (a composer, by the way, who also worked outside of any obvious trends), Makonki in her compositions naturally drew on the mature music of the great Hungarian, but at the same time consistently developed her own style, much more intimate and introspective.
Clear examples of the originality and evolution of Makonka's composer's imagination are her thirteen string quartets, written from 1933 to 1984 and together forming a cycle of quartet literature, in no way inferior to those of Shostakovich or Bartok.
Vitezslava Kapralov (1915–1940)
A few years before the First World War, the inconspicuous Czech composer and concert pianist Vaclav Kapral founded a private music school for aspiring pianists in his native Brno. The school continued to exist after the war, soon earning a reputation as almost the best in the country.
The flow of people wanting to study, and to study specifically from the Corporal himself, even briefly made the composer think about stopping all his other activities in favor of teaching.
Fortunately, his daughter Vitezslava, who at that time had not yet celebrated her tenth birthday, suddenly began to demonstrate extraordinary musical abilities. The girl played the piano better than many adult professionals, memorized the entire classical song repertoire and even began writing short plays.
The corporal developed a plan, surprising in its degree of arrogance, stupidity and commercialism: to raise from Vitezslava a real monster of music, capable of replacing him as the main teacher of the family school.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The ambitious Vitezslava, who wanted to become a composer and conductor, at the age of fifteen entered two relevant faculties at once at the local conservatory. For a woman to want to conduct - this was never seen in the Czech Republic in the 30s before Kapralova.
And to conduct and compose at the same time was generally unthinkable. It was composing music that the newly enrolled student first of all began - and of such quality, such stylistic diversity and in such volumes that there was really no one to compare with.
It is clear why in the series “Mozart in the Jungle” it is Kapralova who becomes the role model for the heroine named Lizzie who cannot sit still: Vitezslava died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 - but at the same time the number of compositions she wrote exceeds the catalogs of very, very many authors.
It is logical to assume, however, that this phenomenal girl did not live to see her final triumph as a composer.
For all their formal quality, Kapralova’s compositions are still stylistically very similar to the music of the leading Czech composer of those years, Boguslav Martinu, who was also a great friend of the Kapral family, who knew Vitezslava from childhood and even managed to fall madly in love with her shortly before the girl’s death.
“A man would rather give birth to a child than a woman write good music,” German composer Johannes Brahms once said. A century and a half later, women composers are gathering the world's largest concert halls, writing music for films and performing important social initiatives.
1. Cassia of Constantinople
The Greek nun Cassia was born into a wealthy Constantinople family in 804 or 805. Today she is known not only as the founder of a convent in Constantinople, but also as one of the first female hymnographers and composers.
Cassia was very beautiful and, according to some sources, in 821 she even took part in the bride parade for Emperor Theophilus. The girl was not destined to become the emperor's wife, and soon Cassia became a nun to spend her whole life in the monastery she founded. There, Cassia composed church hymns and canons, and an analysis of her works, which contain references to the works of ancient authors, allows us to conclude that the girl had a good secular education.
Cassia of Constantinople is one of the first composers whose works can be performed by modern musicians.
2. Hildegard of Bingen
The German nun Hildegard of Bingen was an extraordinary person not only when it came to writing music - she also worked on works on natural history and medicine, wrote mystical books of visions, as well as spiritual poems.
Hildegard was born at the end of the 11th century and was the tenth child in a noble family. From the age of eight, the girl was raised by a nun, and at 14 she began living in a monastery, where she studied art and liturgics.
The girl began composing music based on her own poems as a child, and as an adult she collected her works in a collection called “Harmonic Symphony of Heavenly Revelations.” The collection includes chants, combined into several parts on liturgical themes.
3. Barbara Strozzi
Italian composer Barbara Strozzi, later dubbed "the most virtuoso", was the illegitimate daughter of the poet Giulio Strozzi, who later adopted her. Barbara herself had four illegitimate children from different men. The girl was born in 1619 in Venice and studied with the composer Francesco Cavalli.
Strozzi wrote cantatas, ariettas, madrigals, and her father Giulio wrote the texts for her daughter’s works. Barbara became the first composer to release her works not in collections, but one at a time. Barbara Strozzi's music is still performed and reissued today.
4. Clara Schumann
Nee Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in Leipzig, in the family of Friedrich Wieck, a well-known piano teacher in the city and country. From an early age, the girl learned to play the piano from her father, and already at the age of 10 she began performing successfully in public.
Together with her father, Clara went on a tour of Germany, then gave several concerts in Paris. Around this time, young Clara began writing music - her first works were published in 1829. At the same time, young Robert Schumann became a student of Friedrich Wieck, whose admiration for the teacher’s talented daughter grew into love.
In 1940, Clara and Robert got married. Since then, the girl began to perform music written by her husband, often she was the first to present new works by Robert Schumann to the public. Also, the composer Johannes Brahms, a close friend of the family, trusted Clara with the debut performance of his works.
Clara Schumann's own works were distinguished by their modernity and were considered one of the best examples of the romantic school. Robert Schumann also highly valued his wife’s writings, but he insisted that his wife focus on family life and their eight children.
After the death of Robert Schumann, Clara continued to perform his works, and interest in her own work flared up with renewed vigor in 1970, when recordings of Clara’s compositions first appeared
5. Amy Beach
American Amy Marcy Cheney Beach is the only woman in the so-called “Boston Six” of composers, which, in addition to her, included musicians John Knowles Payne, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward McDowell and Horatio Parker. The Six composers are considered to have had a decisive influence on the formation of American academic music.
Amy was born on September 5, 1867 into a wealthy New Hampshire family. From an early age, the girl studied music under the guidance of her mother, and after the family moved to Boston, she began to study the art of composition. Amy Beach's first solo concert took place in 1883 and was a great success. Two years later, the girl got married and, at the insistence of her husband, practically stopped performing, concentrating on writing music.
She later performed her own works on tour in Europe and America, and today Amy Beach is considered the first woman who managed to make a successful career in high musical art.
6. Valentina Serova
The first Russian female composer, née Valentina Semyonovna Bergman, was born in 1846 in Moscow. The girl failed to graduate from the St. Petersburg Conservatory due to a conflict with the director, after which Valentina began taking lessons from music critic and composer Alexander Serov.
In 1863, Valentina and Alexander got married, and two years later the couple had a son, the future artist Valentin Serov. In 1867, the Serovs began publishing the magazine “Music and Theater”. The couple maintained friendly relations with Ivan Turgenev and Polina Viardot, Leo Tolstoy, Ilya Repin.
Valentina Serova was quite sensitive to her husband’s work, and after his death she published four volumes of articles about her husband, and also completed his opera “Enemy Power.”
Serova is the author of the operas “Uriel Acosta”, “Maria D'Orval”, “Miroed”, “Ilya Muromets”. In addition to music, she also wrote articles about the art of composition, published memoirs about meetings with Leo Tolstoy and memories of her husband and son.
7. Sofia Gubaidulina
Today, Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina lives and works in Germany, but in her native Tatarstan, music competitions and festivals dedicated to the famous native of the republic are held annually.
Sofia Gubaidulina was born in the city of Chistopol in 1931. As a girl, she graduated from the Kazan music gymnasium, and then entered the Kazan Conservatory, where she studied composition. Having moved to Moscow, Gubaidulina continued her studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and after graduating she received an important parting word for herself from the composer Dmitry Shostakovich: “I wish you to follow your “wrong” path.”
Together with Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina was one of the trinity of Moscow avant-garde composers. Gubaidulina worked a lot for cinema and wrote music for such films as “Vertical”, “Man and His Bird”, “Mowgli”, “Scarecrow”.
In 1991, Sofia Gubaidulina received a German scholarship and has since lived in Germany, regularly coming to Russia for concerts, festivals and various social initiatives.
“In Ancient Greece, all harpists were men, but now it is a “female” instrument. Times are changing, and Brahms’ words that “a man would rather give birth to a child than a woman write good music” no longer sound serious,” said Sofia Asgatovna in an interview.