Tribute to the outstanding composer on the 30th anniversary of his passing

Celebrating Weinberg in Finland

February 26th, 2026, marked the 30th anniversary of the passing of the outstanding  composer who was known under different names in different countries. Born as Mojszei Wajnberg, as it is written in his birth certificate, in Poland, working and living in the Soviet Union as Moisei Vainberg, and dying in Moscow in 1996, he has returned to the world stage with a triumph after his passing as Miezyslaw Weinberg, in the Polish pronunciation of his name, which he did like himself, especially later in his life.  

A month before the commemorative date, a superb philharmonic orchestra that Finland has in the face of the Turku Philharmonic, one of the eldest European orchestras in general, performing without interruption for 236 years from 1790 onward, and which is widely known for its harmonious sound and deep and fine understanding of music, gave a memorable concert under the baton of Julian Rachlin, who is well known to the orchestra being there a guest conductor for many years and happy occasions.

Charlotta Kivistö , the orchestra independent, has told me that the very special concert’s idea and program was of Julian’s, and the orchestra was very grateful to their good friend and guest conductor for such a superb choice. The audience at the concert, with the performances of Turku Philharmonic are always sold-out, sat breathless, following every note of both Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Weinberg’s First Sinfonietta.  

There rarely could be a more perfect match, both in music and two great composers who were close friends, with such dramatic destinies of both of them. Shostakovich, who was a maestro with an international reputation , and who was a very caring and empathic man, did help his younger colleague Weinberg, who found himself to be a lonely Jewish refugee in a huge foreign country, in everything , big and small. It can be well said that without Shostakovich, there would not be Weinberg as a recognized composer, and that the life of Miezyslaw would be quite different. 

But before they met, an introvert quiet man with a supreme music talent Miezylaw, who was born Mojsze, had the chain of tragedies in generations. 

Early Years & the Family

Both Weinberg’s great-grandfather and  his grandfather were violently murdered in the infamous Kishinev pogrom in 1903. Both men were book-keepers in a sizable different companies. Weinberg’s father Shmuel, who was 20 at the time, had left Kishinev some years before these terrible events, as did many of his thirteen brothers and sisters, with several of them settled in Baku, Azerbaijan. After the pogrom, the Weinberg family was deeply affected, and the memory of its two leading men, father and son, who were two of 38 victims murdered in the shocking in its agitation and cruelty Kishinev pogrom in 1903, was always present in the Weinberg family, as the composer would share decades later with some of his friends. 

Both Weinberg’s father and mother were talented musicians and performers who had to lead a very difficult and uncertain life of traveling small theatre which was rather a musical group of twenty-something members which were performing all over the lands of shtetls, situated in many places of the Russian Empire, in this case in what’s now is parts of Moldova and Romania.  

In their small traveling theatre, Shmuel Weinberg was a violinist, conductor and composer, and his wife was a singer and actress. She was born in Odessa, and due to her performing career, had also stage pseudonyms. The composer remembered his mother as Sara Kotlisky. He saw her for the last time when he himself was just 19. 

Escape & the destiny of the family

Miezyslaw’s parents, traveling with their theatre all over shtetl-land, found themself in Poland at the time of the Great War. After a short stay in Lodz, they moved to Warsaw and worked at Skala Yiddish theatre there. Their son Mojszei was born there in 1919. He was hugely talented musically and spent his days at the theatre, starting to perform there at the age of ten already and to conduct at the age of twelve. His talent was prompting his parents to seek a professional musical education for the boy. At the age of 12, Miezyslaw started to study at the famous Warsaw Conservatory, which was one of the best musical establishments in Europe. 

His teacher Jozef Turzynski, famous Polish music teacher and musicologist, himself was a student of Buzoni and the other stars of classical music. It was he who recognized the immense talent of young Metek ( Miezyslaw) and arranged the audition of the boy by famous pianist Josef Hofmann who visited Warsaw at the time. Hofmann, an American star of Polish origin, was, in his turn, the only student of Anton Rubinstein and one of the most famous musicians of his time. He was so impressed by young Metek that he insisted that the boy should come to study with him in the US, and have organized the invitation for him to do so. That would be a fantastic opportunity – if only Metek could travel. But the speedily developing in Poland and elsewhere events of the Great War did not allow it to happen. Otherwise, the whole Weinberg family might survive the Shoah. But they did not. 

Metek was studying in the Warsaw Conservatory for 10 years, ending it in 1939. At the same time, he was providing for the entire family, his parents and younger sister Esther, also a very talented musician, especially after the Yiddish theater was shut down and his father became jobless. Later on, Miezyslaw was telling his friends how he was working in three shifts at the time, combining his studies in conservatory with evening shifts at the Warsaw cafes and restaurants as a musician, and with any possible extra otherwise, from marriages to funerals. 

The destiny of Jews in Poland and Warsaw on the eve of the Second World War, and especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was doubly tragic. Many of them had no chance to flee. The Weinbergs tried. There are different accounts of what happened on their way towards the Soviet border in 1939, and how many of them actually tried to leave. Did the entire family leave? Who was returned from the half of the way? Why? It is understood that Weinberg’s mother and sister were in Warsaw. Perhaps, his father has returned with them, as well. Perhaps, none of them left, except young Miezyslaw. Perhaps, his father has managed to go with his son and also has crossed the Soviet border as Miezyslaw did. There was so much pain and confusion with regard to this  tragic attempt to flee the Nazis that Weinberg was never willing to discuss it in detail with anyone. 

We only know for sure that both of his parents and his sister Esther were murdered in the concentration camps. Mother and sister, most likely, in Travniki camp in Poland, while father either there or in another camp in Luninez in Belorussia. 

The ongoing nightmare of this in the case of Weinberg had been aggravated further on, due to the fact that he did not know about the fate of his family for as long as twenty seven years. He learned about their destiny only in 1966 when he managed to travel to Poland from the Soviet Union. 

It was a deeply traumatizing trip for him, as it was to any survivor of the Shoah who dared to come back to the place which was not there anymore. We know many cases like that. Weinberg returned to Warsaw after 27 years of absence , he was walking through the Warsaw streets which he could not recognize. 

I know something from that visit to a ghost-land of his family, hearing it from my dear friend and senior colleague for many years, legendary Marian Turski, who was very active at the time as leading journalist in the highly popular Polityka magazine and as one of the principal Holocaust historians in Poland. Marian knew Weinberg from their childhood, and he was the person with whom the composer was meeting up and talking with during that extremely sad and actually very lonely visit. 

“Metek did find the house where his family lived before the war and from where he was running towards the Soviet border in 1939. Of course, there is the sense of total emptiness when one sees the walls but no other life signs are there. We all have experienced it so many times and in so many cases when we have returned. Those who survived. But in his case, Metek came to Warsaw in the mid-1960s,  so it is more than 25 years after he left Warsaw and his home. It is the span of a generation, a long time in human life.  I know that he could not do it before due to many circumstances. And I remember that I was even surprised and that I was very glad for him that they in Moscow did allow him to go. Allow-to-go-home. Such were the paradoxes of the time. 

We tried to find everything we could about his family, we have had quite a massive card-index of information registering any bit of it regarding the Holocaust here in Poland, at our Historic Jewish Institute, as you know  ( I did. It was, and is a phenomenal and absolutely significant institution in many aspects – IR). So, Metek was devastated when learning about the murder of his family. There is one thing when one does not know and lives in a fog of hope, so to say, and there is another when the sentence is read for your family, and that’s the harsh reality of which you were unaware of for decades. It was very hard for him”, – Marian remembered about Weinberg’s very sad visit  a couple of times when we spoke about the composer and such a painful fate of his family.

What was also complex was Weinberg’s deep attachment to Poland, its language, the Polish music and culture. There is nothing surprising here, as he was born and grew up there, and it all has become a natural part of him. He loved to read in Polish ( as my mom always did and as I still do from time to time ), he loved to speak Polish, and his Polish was very rich and elegant. Needless to say that Weinberg knew great Polish music by heart, and was playing it once and again in his head always, even when he was very ill and bedridden the couple of years prior to his passing in 1996. And very tellingly, after half of century of his life in the Soviet Union being all this time Moisei there, towards the end of his life, he really wanted to get back his Polish name Miezyslaw, and did get his new  official documents on that name. He felt it as a matter for principle for him. Two years before his death, Poland recognized the outstanding musician with a state recognition. It was handed to the bedridden composer in Moscow by the consul from the Polish Embassy who went very emotional during that special encounter, the same as the elderly Metek. 

In a deeply dramatic paradox of life, Weinberg was suffering deeply during his walks and gazes at unrecognizable and empty  for him Warsaw during his only visit there in 1966, to learn the destiny of his family. He never returned there. “ It was too painful for him”, – Marian Turski told me many years later. Still, inside himself, Weinberg felt his Polish belonging as an essential part of himself, till the end of his life. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)