Offertorium (Gubaidulina)

Offertorium (Russian Жертвоприношение) is a concerto for violin and orchestra composed by Sofia Gubaidulina in 1980 and revised in 1982 and 1986. It was dedicated to Gidon Kremer, who in touring with it around the world brought Gubaidulina to international attention.

The story of Offertorium’s commission started with a chance cab ride between Gubaidulina and Kremer, whose playing skills Gubaidulina thoroughly enjoyed. Though virtually unfamiliar with Gubaidulina’s work, Kremer was impressed by the works he did hear and made an offhand request for a violin concerto. This request stuck in the head of the composer, though Kramer soon forgot due to his whirlwind success and allowance to play outside of the Soviet Union for two years. She began working on the piece in the summer of 1979, taking musical advice from Pyotr Meshchaninov, and finished the work in March of 1980.

From that chance encounter, Offertorium was born. Gubaidulina drew inspiration from Kramer’s performance style. In particular, she took advantage of his handling of opposites and their transitions and his tone, which she recognized as expressing “total surrender of the self to the tone.” Thus, Offertorium is an example of a piece crafted both for and from the person to whom it was composed and dedicated. Like many of her other pieces, Offertorium contains religious elements. Even the name Offertorium is a reference to the section of a Mass (performed right after the Credo) that is sung while the priest offers up prepared bread and wine. The piece takes as its overarching theme the concepts of sacrifice and offering: the sacrifice of Christ during the Crucifixion, God’s offering in creating the Earth, the sacrifice of the performer to the tone, the sacrifice of the composer to the art, and the sacrifice of the main musical theme to disintegration and, later, reconstruction.

The work is centered around the royal theme of Frederick the Great in Johann Sebastian Bach's Musikalisches Opfer (BWV 1079). Gubaidulina orchestrates the theme using a Klangfarbenmelodie technique reminiscent of Webern, passing it around various instruments to exploit their various timbres. The introduction presents the theme almost whole—it lacks only the last note. The soloist then enters, beginning a series of variations which deconstruct the theme note by note. After the theme's demise a free rhapsodic interim follows. In the final section, the theme is rebuilt, note by note, from the middle note, until it resembles a Russian Orthodox hymn. The theme as a whole appears only at the very end, with the solo violin ending the piece on the high last note.

In uniting her twin inspirations Webern and Bach, and in the deep Christian symbolism of the theme's "death" and "resurrection", Offertorium is a representative work of Gubaidulina's mature period.

The performance of Offertorium was a tenuous affair—the person to whom it was dedicated and given to perform, Kramer was at odds with the Moscow government for refusing to return to the Soviet Union after his two-year allowance of worldwide performances ran out. Gubaidulina was worried that her piece would never be performed by Kremer, who instead chose to stay in the West. Offertorium’s subject matter was also a barrier to it being performed, as religion was a touchy topic at the time. (In fact, Gubaidulina was unofficially criticized by Tikhon Khrennikov for her heavy use for religion as inspiration). Faced with such bleak circumstances, Gubaidulina asked her publisher Jürgen Köchel to smuggle the score to Kremer through the All-Union Agency on Copyrights. While this was happening, Gubaidulina attempted to get the chorale from Offertorium used in a film (The Great Samoyed by Arkady Kordon) for which she was scoring music but was rejected by the director. The score, however, did finally reach the West and Kramer, who found a venue, the Wiener Festwochen, and the necessary materials to perform the forty minute piece.

After the premiere, Offertorium was lauded for its striking beauty, but was asked to be cut in half. Though it is the subject of debate as to whether the piece actually needed cutting; but nonetheless, the cuts did not take away from the work. The revised edition spread around the globe and brought Gubaidulina worldwide notice.

The piece was first performed in 1981 in Vienna by Kremer and the ORF SO, directed by Leif Segerstam.

References

Kurtz, Michael. "Offertorium-- A Musical Offering." Sofia Gubaidulina: a Biography. Ed. Malcolm Hamrick. Brown. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007. 148-57. Print.

"Offertory." The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. 14 Apr. 2011 <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e7423>.