Mieczysław Weinberg was born in 1919 in Warsaw, where his father was a composer and musical leader at a Jewish theatre, and later moved to Minsk. When the USSR became involved in the war in 1941 Weinberg was forced to leave Minsk, and he instead moved on to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In 1943 Shostakovich, highly impressed by his first symphony, enabled him to take up residence in Moscow, where he was to spend the rest of his life. In the meantime his family in Poland had been murdered by the Nazis, and
in 1948 his father-in-law, the famous Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was liquidated on Stalin’s order on the wave of rising Soviet anti-semitism. A deep friendship was to characterize Weinberg’s relationship with Myaskovsky and Shostakovich, and he showed every new composition to them. Shostakovich also showed his to Weinberg, whom he held to be one of the very best Soviet composers. When Weinberg in 1953 was arrested on a false charge as an enemy of the people, Shostakovich courageously
intervened for him with the secret police, but in the end it was Stalin’s death that saved his life.
In a letter dated 1960 Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaac Glikman: I am very impressed by M.S. Weinberg’s Violin Concerto, superbly interpreted by the
Communist violinist L.B. Kogan. It is a magnificent work. And I am weighing my words. The epithet Communist was an allusion to the dedicatee Kogan’s well-known sympathy for the regime. (The work was not given its first performance until early 1961, but it is possible that Shostakovich had heard it being played at the Composer’s Union.) This was at the beginning of Weinberg’s most successful period as a composer. He never joined the Party and as an immigrant he was no favourite of the authorities, yet the foremost artists of the country were queuing up to perform new works by him, and the vast majority of his compositions were indeed performed at the mostfamous venues in Moscow and elsewhere.
Weinberg had a strong sense of the dramatic, but it was equally his mild sense of humour that helped him through the difficulties of life. Weinberg related Myaskovsky’s reaction when they were standing together at a meeting where the 1948 Party Decree against formalists among them Myaskovsky himself was being discussed in a venomous atmosphere. Weinberg, in jest, whispered: This is a historical Decree!, but in response Myaskovsky hissed: Not historical. Hysterical. In all, Weinberg composed over One-hundred and fifty songs and twenty-six Symphonies. He also composed nineteen sonatas, seventeen string quartets, seven seven operas and many other works. He died in Moscow on 26 February, 1996, at the age of 76.
