Sofia Gubaidulina's talks with Enzo Restagno is the result of Sofia Gubaidulina's with an Italian professor Enzo Restagno a ten-days interview in January 1991. The composer answers the professor's questions about many events and persons, well-known to her, in chronology. She gives her own true personal opinion about them.

Sofia Gubaidulina was bom on Oktober 24, 1931 in Chistopol (Tatar ASSR), in a Russian-Tatar family. Her parents were not musicians, her father is a mining engineer. Her grandfather was a mullah and an educator. When she began to learn music as a child, she decided to be a musician. Sofia finished a musical school and then graduated from a conservatoire in the capital of Tataria Kazan, as a pianist. Gubaidulina speaks about the high intellectual culture of Kazan.

But she understood that she needed to live in the center of the musical culture to become a true composer. And in 1954 Sofia went to Moscow, where she was educated as a composer in the Moscow Conservatoire (under prof. Nikolai Peiko, 1959) and took a post-graduate course (also with prof. Vissarion Shebalin, 1963).

Sofia Gubaidulina visited Moscow in 1953. It was when Stalin died and she witnessed the mass phsychosis of Soviet people during the funeral of the tsar-tyrant.

Sofia Gubaidulina knew Dmitry Shostakovich. He was Head of the Examination Board, when Sofia was graduating from the Moscow Conservatoir. He spoke in support of her works and defended the young composer before the other members of the Board. Shostakovich was interested in Gubaidulina's life in subsequent years, too. Once he said to her: «I wish you to walk your own «unconventional» path».

One of the important events Gubaidulina recalls is Glenn Gould's concerts in Moscow in 1957 in which he performed Bern's and Webern’s works. Another great event in the musical life of Moscow was the visit of Igor Stravinsky in 1962. Sofia Gubaidulina attended of the famous artist's rehearsals. In his manner of conducting she saw a contrast between the left and right hands: the left meant intuitio, and the right meant ratio.

Answering the question about Nikita Khrushchov Sofia Gubaidulina tells about the immence impression produced on her by his exposure of Stalin's cult. It meant the end to the hermetic isolation of the soviet society. But it did not mean freedom yet. «Struggle for freedom of thought is the most important task in our life», — Gubaidulina thinks. The composer speaks about the great impact of the Festival «Warszawska Jesien» (since 1956) which was an important source of information on modern music for the Soviet composers.

Gubaidulina estimates Pierre Boulez' arrival in the USSR in 1964 as a important event, too. He performed Schoenberg, Webern and his own Work «Éclat». In passing she tells about a tragicomical incident: an attempt to prevent (by force) Edison Denisov from meeting Pierre Boulez.

Enzo Restagno and Sofia Gubaidulina are discussing the appearance of the minimal technique in Arvo Part's works which happened even earlier than in American music, the appearance of the microchromatics in Alexander Skrjabin's music and «Proportions of Fibonacci» in Bela Bartok's.

The interlocutors discuss all the evolution of Sofia Gubaidulina's creative work, beginning with the «Five Etudes» for harp, double bass and percussion (1965). Gubaidulina talks about impulses to her work. In passing she says that the Soviet state gave financial support to musical works about the Communist Party, Lenin, the Revolution but refused to support free musical thought. And since early '90s the Soviet/Russian composers have had no financial support from the state at all.

The conversation touches upon the role of Skrjabin's Museum in Moscow, where many young musicians met and united. It was in this Museum that the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music, was founded and it was here that Schnittke, Denisov, Gubaidulina, Eduard Artemyev, Pyotr Meshchaninov worked. Her experience with electronic instruments as well as traditional one's gave Gubaidulina the idea, that the 12-tone scale is too limited for contemporary music which needs a finer scale.

Gubaidulina tells about her first meetings with Mark Pekarsky, Natalia Shakhovskaya, Vladimir Toncha, Ivan Monigetti, Boris Berman, Gidon Kremer, Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman, Friedrich Lips, Valery Popov and their gradually increasing involvement in her work. She talks about symbolics in many of her works: «In Croce», «Seven Words», «Light and Darkness», «Jubilatio», «Offertorium», Symphony «Stimmen... Verstummen...», «Alleluja» and others.

By way of digression from the interview there is a story about the interlocutor's trip to Zagorsk. The talk touches upon the meaning of religion for the Russian people and Russian music.