A Musical Fairytale

It’s difficult for us to imagine the dire significance of Sofia Gubaidulina’s meeting with Dmitri Shostakovich in 1959 in Soviet Russia, where the Kremlin’s disapproval of a piece of music could put its composer in mortal peril. Born in 1931, Gubaidulina was, like Shostakovich, censured by the Kremlin while still in her twenties. Authorities warned her to change her music’s “mistaken path” to conform to government standards. Earlier, when Stalin condemned Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the composer was twenty-nine—about the same age as Gubaidulina when he met with her two decades later.

Shostakovich reportedly told her, “My wish for you is that you should continue along your mistaken path.” Though Stalin had died six years before they met, Shostakovich still risked purge or exile with each new composition. His advice was a call for bravery in facing a danger that was real, grave, and avoidable—if only Gubaidulina would compromise her artistic freedom. She wouldn’t.

In fact, Gubaidulina had long guarded her covertly rebellious spirit. Early in life she discovered Western classical music and religious mysticism—both officially restricted subjects—and connected them in her musical studies at the government-run Children’s Music School. At the Kazan Conservatory, where contemporary Western music was banned, she and her friends found ways to study it in secret. “We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly,” she recalled later.

When international interest in Gubaidulina’s work surged in the 1980s, the Kremlin still faulted her as lacking the very qualities we hear most strongly in her Fairytale Poem: esthetic beauty, accessibility, optimism, and a socially beneficial sense of purpose. She is bold in exploring the outer reaches of instrumental ranges, but the sound remains shimmering and luminous. This tone poem is based on a tender allegory by Miloš Macourek, “The Little Piece of Chalk,” about a piece of chalk condemned to render only numbers and boring shapes on a blackboard until, as Gubaidulina notes, a child finally takes it “out into the daylight and begins to draw castles, gardens with pavilions and the sea with the sun on the pavement.” Like her tone poem, the chalk simply dissolves into beauty.

Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem opens our New World Symphony concert, Nov. 30 – Dec. 2, 2023. To learn more and get tickets, please click here.

You can watch a video of Vladimir Jurowski conducting Fairytale Poem below.