Mieczyslaw (Moisey) Weinberg (1919-1996); RUS/POL   

One of the best-kept secrets of twentieth century Russian music is the work of Polish-born Soviet composer Moisey (Mieczyslaw) Weinberg, often spelled as Vainberg. Weinberg was born in a Warsaw ghetto to a family of itinerant Jewish theatrical performers. He made his debut as pianist at the age of ten, and by age 12 was studying at the Warsaw Conservatory. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Weinberg fled to Minsk, enrolling in the conservatory and studying with Vasily Zolotaryov. In 1943 Weinberg sent the score of his first symphony to Dmitry Shostakovich, who was impressed and arranged for Weinberg to be invited to Moscow under official approval. This was the beginning of their long friendship and of Weinberg's career as a Soviet composer.

Weinberg was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Nazi Holocaust. His father-in-law was executed as an enemy of the state in 1948, just as Weinberg attracted the ire of Soviet authorities through his opposition to Zhdanov's attack on formalism during the Soviet Composers Union Congress. In early 1953, Weinberg was detained during the so-called "Doctor's Plot" and readied for execution. Shostakovich intervened on Weinberg's behalf with Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD, but the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, earned Weinberg his freedom. For the rest of the 1950s, Weinberg kept his profile low, but his work continued and ultimately found favor with performers such as pianist Emil Gilels and conductor Kurt Sanderling. In 1962 Kiril Kondrashin took up the cause of Weinberg's Symphony No. 5; the Symphony No. 6 for boy's chorus and orchestra Op. 79 (1963) helped establish Weinberg's reputation within Russia and remains his best-known work. Weinberg's own judgment was that the opera Passazhirka (The Passenger, Op. 97, 1968) was the most significant of his compositions. Weinberg's sizeable and impressive output runs to 156 opus numbers and includes ten operas, three ballets, 25 symphonies, 17 string quartets, many choral works, and music to more than 60 motion pictures. Weinberg's style is Romantic at its core, but makes use of a highly expanded tonal palette combined with vibrant instrument coloring. Since Weinberg's death, recordings of his music are finally beginning to leak out to the west, and his never-mediocre symphonies have struck a responsive chord among many enthusiasts of mainstream orchestral literature, in particular those listeners already favorably disposed toward the music of Shostakovich.

© Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

###

Moisey Weinberg (Mieczyslaw Vainberg) was born in Warsaw in 1919, the son of a Jewish theater composer, began composing at the age of 10 and shortly thereafter began studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, studying piano with Jozef Turczinski. With the outbreak of the World War II, Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union, and entered the Minsk Conservatory in 1939, where he studied composition with Vassily Zolotaryov - himself a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1941, Weinberg was again forced to flee, this time to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he married the daughter of famed Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels - who was later assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 1948, during the so-called "Stalin Terror". It was at this same period that he met and befriended Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a consistent supporter of Weinberg's music, and who had a big influence on the latter's musical development.

In the years following the war, Weinberg, like many other Soviet composers, came under official attack for his modernist (formalism, cosmopolitanism) tendencies; along with Myaskovsky, Weinberg refused to repent, and as a result experienced official resistance for his music, forcing him to earn a living writing music for the theater and circus. He was even arrested in 1953 for specious reasons, and spent 3 months in a prison - likely saved from death through a favorable letter from Shostakovich. Despite his political troubles, however, Weinberg's music gradually gained attention from performers and conductors in Russia and Europe - such as Emil Gilels, Mariya Grinberg, Alexander Gauk, and Kurt Saunderling.

His final three decades were quite prolific and less tumultuous, during which time he wrote perhaps his masterpiece, the opera Passazhirka ('The Passenger', 1968), and many of his 25 symphonies. In all, Weinberg wrote music for all mediums - stage, orchestral, chamber, piano, vocal, as well as music for theater, film, TV, radio, cartoons, and the circus. Many of his works have a programmatic theme, some of which are dedicated to the themes of despair, destruction, and hope that reflect his own experiences as an outsider (Jewish, modernist) within his society.

We are very pleased to feature the music of this important, though often neglected, composer here at the Classical Archives.

Moisey Weinberg
email: vainberg@rdm.ru

Below are works by M.Weinberg that every music lover should explore: