Prolog for orchestra
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born October 24, 1931, in Chistopol, in what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republic (now The Republic of Tatarstan within Russia), and died in Appen, Germany, on March 13, 2025, having lived in Germany since 1992. She began Prolog in 2020 as the opening movement to her Wrath of God, which itself was derived from the thirteenth movement of her large-scale 2016/2018 oratorio On Love and Hate. Prolog was co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Andris Nelsons, Gewandhauskapellmeister. Prolog was left incomplete upon Gubaidulina’s death. Her longtime friend Elena Firsova (born March 21, 1950, in Leningrad, Russia; lives in St Albans, UK) was asked to complete the score. Using Gubaidulina’s existing music and her notes about structure and intent (see below), she completed it by mid-2026. World premiere performances: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducting, September 24-26, 2026.
Prolog is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, E-flat clarinet, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 4 Wagner tubas, 2 bass tubas, timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, bells, tubular bells, triangle, suspended cymbals, gong, large tam-tam, tenor snare drum, bass drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Sofia Gubaidulina grew up in Kazán, the capital of the Tatarstan in the Soviet Union, where her family moved when she was young. She had piano lessons from age 5 and began composing for herself around the same time. She studied piano and composition at the Kazán Conservatory, graduating in 1954, and moved to Moscow to attend the Moscow Conservatory. Upon graduation from that school, she was encouraged by Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading composer in the USSR, to follow her own path. Like many other Soviet Union composers of her generation (and with the encouraging precedent of Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s work in the medium), Gubaidulina made much of her living by composing for film, which allowed her to experiment with style, novel instrumental combinations, dramatic devices, and other tools of the contemporary composer.
In 1969-70 Gubaidulina worked in Moscow’s electronic music studio, and in the late 1970s she formed, with the composers Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, an improvisational performance group, Astraea, through which she explored obscure Central Asian folk instruments as well as those from other traditions, such as the Japanese koto and East Asian percussion. She also became rather enamored of the Russian bayan, a type of accordion, for which she wrote a number of major pieces. Beyond her bayan works, Gubaidulina’s preoccupation with instrumental timbre led to many pieces for unusual configurations, such as her Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings; Early in the Morning, Right Before Waking for seven kotos, and percussion works including Can You Hear Us, Luigi? Look at the Dance a Simple Little Rattle Is Performing for You, a percussion piece created entirely from a trove of non-traditional percussion instruments the sympathetic Italian composer Luigi Nono had provided to his colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. These smaller works reveal a delight in experimentation and music-making that can be found also in such large-scale, intensely spiritual works as her violin concerto Offertorium and her St. John Passion and St. John Easter.
Gubaidulina also went beyond the acoustic limitations of the traditional Western chromatic scale by incorporating microtones into her music, either melodically as part of a non-equal tempered tuning of the “pure” harmonic overtone series, or more texturally as a differently colored harmonic “pitch-field” (usually varying by quarter-tones, which are relatively easy to hear) for a specific group of instruments within a larger group. For example, she used a string quartet tuned a quarter-tone low among the standard-tuned orchestra in her Viola Concerto.
These works highlight Gubaidulina’s interest in the physical world of sound, which parallels a complementary interest in balanced but intricate musical architecture. Like J.S. Bach and many other composers and visual artists before her, she employed the design principle of the Golden Section, a metaphor for spiritual perfection. The spirituality that infuses her most important works is rooted in Christianity, but rebels against many of the ossified tenets of the Church. The shape of the cross, which is the conceptual basis of many of her musical forms, reconciles her spirituality and her works’ architectural needs.
Gubaidulina’s abiding musical influences were to be found among the great composers of the Western world, particularly J.S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, who looms large for Prolog and the works related to it. The music of Dmitri Shostakovich and Anton Webern was also deeply influential. Bach and Webern are both explicitly part of Gubaidulina’s breakthrough violin concerto, Offertorium (1980), which draws on the theme from Bach’s Musical Offering and refers to Webern’s orchestration of that piece. She wrote the concerto for the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, who championed the piece throughout Western Europe and the U.S. and, more than any other single musician, brought Gubaidulina’s music to an international public. Offertorium has since become one of the most frequently performed concertos of recent decades.
During the political and cultural thaw between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the late 1980s, Gubaidulina began to travel outside of the Soviet Union to hear premieres of her music. She made her first trip to the U.S. for performances of her String Quartet No. 3 in Louisville in the fall of 1987. The following spring, she returned for the American/Soviet Cultural Exchange “Making Music Together,” which took place in Boston. At that time Kremer performed and recorded Offertorium with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Charles Dutoit. In summer 1997 Gubaidulina was a composer in residence at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, during which several of her pieces were performed.
Gubaidulina’s music has entered the repertoires of every major U.S. ensemble. Among other works, her Viola Concerto was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and violist Yuri Bashmet, and her Two Paths: Music for Two Violas and Symphony Orchestra was a New York Philharmonic commission, first performed under Kurt Masur’s direction in 1999. She wrote violin concertos for both Anne-Sophie Mutter and Vadim Repin. Gubaidulina was also one of four composers (the others being Wolfgang Rihm, Osvaldo Golijov, and Tan Dun) commissioned by Helmuth Rilling and the Bachakademie to write one of four Passions to commemorate the millennium as well as the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death. Her Johannes-Passion was premiered in September 2000.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned Gubaidulina’s orchestral work The Light of the End following performances here of her Viola Concerto in 1997. A heavy schedule of commitments delayed that piece until 2003, and it was premiered by the BSO under Kurt Masur’s direction in April of that year. Andris Nelsons led performances of that piece in October 2021. Nelsons also led the premiere performances of another BSO commission, the composer’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and bayan in February 2017, as well as her Offertorium with violinist Baiba Skride in 2014 and The Wrath of God in April 2024. He also performed and recorded The Wrath of God with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig along with The Light of the End and, with soloist Vadim Repin, her violin concerto Dialog: Ich und Du. In her final years, Gubaidulina stopped accepting commissions, though she responded to requests that piqued her interest and offered new opportunities for exploration.
Dialog: Ich und Du and The Wrath of God were written in parallel, and both originated in a much larger work, Gubaidulina’s 2016 oratorio for vocal soloists, two choruses, and orchestra Über Liebe und Haß (On Love and Hate), which was premiered in a fifty-minute, nine-movement version in 2016 and which she expanded to fifteen movements two years later. The piece was triggered by her encountering, in German, the text of the prayer “O Komm, Heiliger Geist” (“O come, Holy Spirit”), her setting of which is the final movement of the oratorio and which also exists as an independent work. The oratorio sets Psalm and prayer texts in German, Russian, Italian, French, and English, reflecting the composer’s own prayer that superficially disparate cultures find common ground in their shared yearning for higher spiritual goals.
Gubaidulina conceived her Prolog to precede Wrath of God, which is a substantial expansion and amplification of the orchestral thirteenth movement of Über Liebe und Haß. The composer spoke of Prolog as being the questions for which The Wrath of God provided an answer. “Both The Wrath of God and Prolog are dedicated to Beethoven. Prolog is intended to present the reason for the finale. And that is: Questions, questions, questions. In Beethoven’s last string quartet [Opus 135 in F], a phrase appears at the beginning of the last movement that has always fascinated me: Must it be? It has to be! [Muß es sein? Es muß sein!] I go one step further and ask, Must it be so? Yes, it has to be! The Wrath of God then gives the answer to this question.”
Gubaidulina began Prolog in 2020 and worked on it intermittently until her death; as early as 2021, she told Elena Firsova that it was nearly complete, but when the materials for the piece were delivered to her following Gubaidulina’s death, she found less music than she expected, amounting to 140 bars, or about 6 1/2 minutes. Firsova relates that Gubaidulina left notes about the overall plan of the piece, which
was mainly in words, and it was quite detailed about the dramatic and philosophical progression…. There were roughly ten different sections. I followed this structure as closely as I could, although there were a few instructions whose meaning I simply could not reconstruct…. Questions are fundamental to the work. In the music Sonia completed, there is a first question, a second question, a third question. Her plan then describes what should happen: the chorus trying to understand what is happening; the Abyss; the tragedy of the individual; attempts to escape the Abyss and move toward the light; the appearance of God; the suffering of humanity; a final attempt to move the stone of Sisyphus; the last question; and finally, chaos.
Sometimes the plan gave an image or idea without any music at all. For example, in the Abyss she specified an oboe solo representing individuality and the tragedy of individuality, but she left no notes for it. I therefore had to compose the solo myself.
Prolog is characteristic of Gubaidulina’s orchestral work in being made up of instrumental textures of varying density and intensity, using the colors of the different orchestral sections and solo instruments to activate expressive ideas, as Firsova suggests above. Her approach to musical time is, as always, remarkable and powerfully effective. Active passages in which individual lines and fragments are massed in counterpoint give way to sustained episodes with little forward motion. Occasionally the density of detailed counterpoint is such that the nuance is subsumed into seeming chaos. Firsova’s continuation maintains Gubaidulina’s voice and intention for another thirteen or so minutes from the work’s original truncated state.
Elena Firsova is a prolific composer who first gained recognition in her native Russia in the mid-1970s, around the time she first met Sofia Gubaidulina (who asked Firsova to call her “Sonia”). She was mentored by the composer Edison Denisov, among others. In 1979 she and six other composers were strongly denounced by the First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, for welcoming opportunities for performances outside of the USSR. In 1991 Firsova emigrated with her husband, the composer Dmitri Smirnov, and their children to England.
Firsova had received her first foreign commission from the BBC for her Earthly Life, a setting of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, which achieved great success following its 1984 premiere by the Nash Ensemble and led to wider recognition in England and internationally. Among her most significant works are her opera The Nightingale and the Rose, which premiered at the Almeida Opera Festival; her Requiem, premiered by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; and her Piano Concerto, composed for and championed worldwide by pianist Yefim Bronfman. Like Gubaidulina’s Prolog and Wrath of God, the concerto contemplates Beethoven’s “Muß es sein?” question. Firsova wrote the concerto in response to the death of her husband in 2020.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Acts of Homage and Fascination
It is unusual for a composer to be asked to complete a work by another composer. The most famous case by far is Mozart’s Requiem, of which about 30% was composed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr. That circumstance resulted from a pragmatic decision by Mozart’s widow Constanze, who for financial reasons needed to deliver the finished score to its commissioner. Later composers, however, have felt compelled to re-complete Mozart’s piece, aiming for greater stylistic cohesion. These later versions are more in line with the completions by musicologists and composers of tantalizing torsos and near-finished works by other acknowledged masters.
Among the most famous completions of music by master composers are the English musicologist Deryck Cooke’s of Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony; Italian composer Franco Alfano’s of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (or composer Luciano Berio’s acclaimed 2002 version); Béla Bartók’s student Tibor Serly’s of his teacher’s Viola Concerto; and Friedrich Cerha’s of Alban Berg’s final opera Lulu. All are speculative; all are collaborative; and all required empathy for the original voice and intent. (There are similar stories from the other arts—but a completion of a Raphael painting is by its nature more permanent than a completion of a symphony or play.)
When Elena Firsova was asked to complete Sofia Gubaidulina’s Prolog, her first instinct was to refuse. “But when I came home and told my daughter, she said, ‘Mama, you have to do it. If you refuse, almost certainly somebody else will be asked, and nobody will be able to do it as well as you, because you knew Sonia [the name by which Gubaidulina was known to her friends] so well and you know her music perhaps better than any other composer. For the memory of Sonia, you have to do it.’ I thought about it for a while and decided that perhaps my daughter was right.”