With Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina was a black sheep of Soviet cultural life. Her position was aggravated by her faith and a mystical approach to music, evidenced by her replies to my questions.

When I contacted her, she was still living in the Soviet Union; by the time we met, briefly, in the 1990s, she had settled in Germany. I think it must have been at a concert in Innsbruck, Austria, that I went up to her, instinctively slowing down my steps, softening my voice and bending my back. It is not that she looked frail: she has a round baby face, pretty even in her sixties. It was the vulnerability in her eyes that made me hesitate about whether I should go ahead and introduce myself. She struck me as extremely shy, anxious to protect her privacy. When I did address her, it was her publisher, sitting next to her, who replied; Gubaidulina looked almost frightened and beat a hasty retreat.

I was full of admiration for her wonderfully intense violin concerto Offertorium 1980–86), which had taken my breath away when I heard it on the radio, with Gidon Kremer as soloist.

For many years I did not know much else but was aware of her fascinatingly mixed background, which no doubt influenced her outlook: one of her grandfathers was a mullah, her father was a Tartar (in fact, she was born at Chistopol in Tatarstan), her mother had Russian, Polish, and Jewish blood. No wonder she is on record as saying “I am the place where East meets West.”

Sofia Gubajdulina was kind enough to revise her contribution for a publication of the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin. Her Russian text was translated into German by Hans-Ulrich Duffek, director of the composer’s publisher, Sikorski.

Your questions have induced me to ponder on these things which are actually self-evident. In reality, however, they turn out to be extraordinarily complex— especially the third question. But let us consider them one after the other.

I.

It has never happened in my life that the encounter with a work by another composer would have made me realize that I could compose basically in a different way.