Mieczysław Weinberg
Compositeur
Mieczysław Weinberg, who lived in exile for 57 years, was long considered one of the great unknowns of the 20th century. Dmitri Shostakovich, who supported him and became his friend, praised the “beauty and grandeur” of Weinberg’s music. The Polish composer left behind 21 completed symphonies, five operas and numerous other orchestral and chamber music works. The stage premiere of his opera The Passenger at the 2010 Bregenz Festival caused a sensation; the work was hailed as a “masterpiece” and the “rediscovery of the year”, if not of the decade.
Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919, and began taking piano lessons at the local conservatory at the age of 12. While studying piano, the young musician also worked at the Jewish theatre, where his father was employed as a composer and violinist. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union: a border guard entered the Jewish version of his first name (Moisej) in his passport, which was not officially changed again until 1982. Weinberg settled in Minsk, where he studied composition under Vasily Solotaryov, a pupil of Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1941, he was forced to flee the German Wehrmacht once again – this time to Uzbekistan, where he worked as a répétiteur at the opera house in Tashkent. Dmitri Shostakovich personally ensured that Weinberg received a residence permit for Moscow. Ten years after moving to the Soviet capital (1953), he was arrested at the height of the anti-Semitic “Kremlin doctors’ plot” invented by Stalin: His wife was a close relative of Miron Vovsi, the director of the Botkin Clinic in Moscow and the main defendant in the show trial against the “murderers in white coats”. Weinberg was taken to Lubyanka Prison, prompting Shostakovich to write a letter to the notorious secret service chief Lavrentiy Beria on his behalf. The fact that Weinberg survived was due to Stalin’s sudden death. After the war, the composer never returned to Poland again. Despite rampant anti-Semitism, he identified with his country of exile, as it had enabled him to continue his music studies and start his professional career after fleeing from the Germans.
