Mieczysław Weinberg

Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919 to a family of Polish-Jewish musicians who worked in the Yiddish theatre. His life was shattered in September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland: Weinberg fled east on foot toward Soviet territory, while his parents and sister remained behind. They were murdered at the Trawniki concentration camp. He never saw them again.

After years in Minsk and Tashkent, Weinberg settled in Moscow in October 1943 and met Shostakovich, the start of one of the most remarkable friendships in twentieth-century music. The two played each other their new works, and Weinberg was Shostakovich’s partner in the four-hand play-throughs of his new orchestral scores. When Weinberg was arrested by Stalin’s secret police in February 1953 and held at the Lubyanka, Shostakovich wrote to the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria on his behalf and offered to take in Weinberg’s young daughter should the worst happen. Stalin’s death a few weeks later led to Weinberg’s release that April.

Despite a catalogue of staggering scale (more than twenty symphonies, seventeen string quartets, seven operas, concertos, ballets, songs and a large body of film music), Weinberg remained largely unknown in the West for decades. Only since the 1990s has his music begun to take its rightful place in the international repertoire, with major orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, championing his cause.