Religion and Symbolism in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium: A Narrative Sacrifice [ABSTRACT]

Sofia Gubaidulina uses a quotation from the King’s theme from Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer as the structural basis for her Offertorium. Not only is it played in a Webernian orchestration, but its progressive shrinking toward its middle — by successive removals of the first and last notes — was given a narrative by the composer. During the course of an interview with Vera Lukomsky, Gubaidulina briefly emphasized the constructive and symbolic roles of the famous theme in the Offertorium; here are a few comments she then made: (1) This theme symbolizes the idea of sacrifice. (2) The first section consists of several variations, where the theme “offers” itself, “sacrificing” one note from the beginning and one from the end in each variation. (3) The second section is devoted to images of “cross suffering” and the Last Judgment. (4) The main event of the concerto — the Transfiguration — is in the coda: Frederick’s theme appears in its complete shape, but in retrograde motion, and nobody can recognize it.[1] Besides, a simpler symbolism of crosses can also be found in some symmetrical deployment of the score.

Applying profound religious symbolism to musical matter raises a patent problem. Whereas one could start from the composer’s point of view and explore how that author’s program is exemplified in the work, my presentation will adopt a more critical approach in order to confront the program with its materialization. To avoid blindly fitting the music into the composer's narrative — or, for that matter, into anyone else's program — I will firstly concentrate on a musical investigation of evocative materials. That will allow me to demonstrate that there is a conflict between the composer’s proposed narrative and its musical embodiment: it seems clear that her interpretation is neither the simplest nor the most immediate one. For example, where she sees sacrifice, I see erosion; where she makes a Transfiguration analogy, I make one of Resurrection.

Umberto Eco foresaw the existence of such interpretative divergences when he described the intrinsic duality of the author/reader pair: in short, “the empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of model reader postulated by the text.”[2] However, in the Offertorium’s case, those conjectures seem to contradict what Gérard Genette called the public epitext of the composer; and even Eco is of little help in such circumstances. My paper will present a reconciliation attempt for those discrepancies not by the elaboration of a single definitive interpretation, but rather in the sacrifice of such narrative.

1. Vera Lukomsky, “Sofia Gubaidulina, ‘My Desire is Always to Rebel, to Swim against the Stream’,”  Perspective of New Music, 36 (1998), 26-27.

2. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64.