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

Part I can be read here. 

Soviet years  and Shostakovich

Surviving alone, without  family and friends, young 20-year old Metek Weinberg did manage to cross the border into Soviet territory in the summer of 1939. He got to the Minsk conservatory, completed his studies there in 1941, and was very lucky to be evacuated to Tashkent as the war zone was getting extremely close to Minsk in no time. 

In Tashkent, within a large group of evacuated well-known musicians and artists, Weinberg got to know two colleagues who were close to Dmitry Shostakovich, and who were willing to show to the leading Soviet composer Weinberg’s First Symphony, a starting point of his serious music’s development.

A few weeks after Shostakovich received Weinberg’s First Symphony, he organised an official possibility for the  composer and his young wife to move to Moscow, which was not easy, doubly so during the war. 

Dmitry Shostakovich was a rare person, very decent and humanistic. Professionally, since he heard Weinberg’s music in 1943, he  immediately recognised his talent. But not less importantly, and in the case of the difficult and lonely life of Weinberg, Shostakovich took him under his wing  in a cordial and understated human way.  

The warm friendship of those two big composers blossomed for over 30 years, until the passing of Dmitry Shostakovich. Tellingly, after Shostakovich’s death in 1975, Weinberg was still in a very close and warm friendly relationship with his widow Irina, and it was her, along with a couple of friends , who did support aged and very sick , helpless in many respects Weinberg, in the end of his life. A noble human story of a true un-boasting friendship.  

Knowing Weinberg’s current fame and popularity, it really is hard to believe that he enjoyed only a decade of the 1960s of a satisfactory life, both professionally and otherwise.  

Back in Soviet times, Weinberg experienced quite a special treatment: his music was known to virtually everyone there because he was the author of many most popular melodies for widely beloved movies and cartoons, but very few people apart from the professional musical circles  associated that widely recognised music with that man, his other serious symphonic and modern instrumental  music.

In the USSR, even his name was something different from his native one. Coming to the USSR in a run for his life being twenty, and dying there at the age of 77, he lived almost all 57 years in the USSR as Moisei Vainberg, not as Miezyslaw Weinberg, although his friends and close circle still called him Metek, as his parents did. In the end of his life, he decided to change all his Soviet official documents for his Polish first name, Miezyslaw. He said that he felt it was important to get it back officially , too. 

His life was not easy in the USSR, not at all. We know that he was super-vigilant, nervous and unsure all the time, for years and decades. He was afraid to invoke any attention  from the side of the Big Brother. Who could blame him?

 Weinberg’s first wife happened to be the daughter of Solomon Michoels, great Russian and Soviet Yiddish actor, who was incredibly active internationally in organising the support for the USSR during the Second World War , only to be brutally murdered in 1948, in a typical Stalinist gangster way towards their own citizens. In early 1953, soon before Stalin’s death, Michoels’ cousin Miron Vovsi , who was a prominent doctor, the chief doctor of the Red Army during WWII and the doctor for the patients from the Kremlin, has become the first person in the drafted by the NKVD list of the famous doctors to be arrested in the disgusting antisemitic witch-hunt known as the Doctors’ Affair.

From 1948 onward, there were several waves of harsh national-wise repressions against the Jews in the Soviet Union, intensified after the establishment of the State of Israel. Sometimes, I am thinking that the merciless persecution of surviving the Holocaust  Soviet Jews, all of them contributing highly and dearly to the Soviet victory in WWII, had been caused by the maniacal criminal Stalin’s dissatisfaction that not all of them have perished. 

Weinberg was arrested as a member of Michoels-Vovsi family, with an emphasis that he had  ‘arrived from abroad’, as it was written in the NKVD record. Being from abroad meant in Soviet reality a highly potential enemy by definition. 

Shostakovich and a couple of decent people among the well-known Soviet composers and musicians immediately rushed to organise help for Weinberg in an effort to release him, with Shostakovich written to Beria personally. It was a very daring deed.  

The relief came from an unexpected direction. Stalin personally did help by the fact of his dying. Otherwise, the destiny of Weinberg , and the millions of others, including my father-in-law and my own grandfather, both arrested in the wave of Stalin’s absurd and ruthless persecutions against so-called ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalists’, could be an ultimate death in the Gulag and prisons.  My father-in-law spent five years in the most terrible place of Gulag known as Valley of Death,  coming out of there with tuberculosis and dying soon after being only 39. My grandfather spent about three years in the NKVD prison at the same time, fighting for his survival as a gladiator, literally, daily. They both, like Weinberg, were released solely due to the miracle of the timing for Stalin’s death.  Many others were not that lucky. 

So poor Weinberg, additionally to all the tragedies in his family, also had had to experience the Soviet prison under the NKVD command first-hand. He was sitting in the cell at the NKVD main Lubjanka prison. This was a crushing experience.

I was there in a shortly-timed window in the early and  mid-1990s while filming one of my documentaries on modern history, The Morning After the Cold War. I can tell that these places are of the character that gets under your skin momentarily and stays there for good. These are the places of absolute gloom and complete hopelessness. From that perspective, I understand why Weinberg was always so very cautious with regard to the Soviet authorities. He spent almost 60 years of his 77 years of life under direct oppression and palpable fear. I feel very sorry for him and his talent. 

Violin & The Passenger

But in his music, you would not find the sound-in-black. You would find the very essence of the tragic XX century in its fine way,  with controlled emotions reflecting inner thoughts and memories. You would not find hysterical cries although his and his generation’s life have provided so many reasons for that. Instead, you would find refined reflections in whispers, a hint of a cry, smiling memories and poetic allusions.  

At the same time, Weinberg’s music is very sophisticated, modern and brainy – and still, harmonious and appealing. The musical planet created by Miezyslaw Weinberg is a special experience. It is modern and melodic, crispy intellectual and disarmingly heartfelt at the same time. Even if some of his listeners are not aware of the details of his exceptionally tragic life, they would recognize something emotional but contained, something reaching out but suspended, something very personal and generally humane in his musical plea from a lonely Jewish soul towards those who would be interested to hear it – and to understand, even partially. 

There is no coincidence that the violin has a dominant place in everything Miezyslaw Weinberg ever composed. It was an ongoing homage to his father, or rather existing interconnection with Shmuel Weinberg who was murdered in the Nazi concentration camp being just fifty. In many roles he was busy with  in his intense life, Shmuel first and foremost was a violinist, and a very talented one, according to some memories about the Weinberg family. In those endless violin parts, from a movie melody to the symphonies, Metek Weinberg was speaking with his murdered father, who in turn, was son and grandson of violently murdered Jewish men.

Three generations of talented people, immediate predecessors of Weinberg, had been murdered most brutally. How could he, the only one who survived, make up to them? Only by speaking to them and about them in his beautiful, not sugar-like, not kitschy, but highly talented and professional, fine newly created melodies. It was not only his Kaddish for his family, but also, his ongoing commemoration of them. He was thinking about them all the time, as it transpires from many of his interviews and conversations with contemporaries that have been recorded. Quiet introvert Metek was right in his approach – his music, so widely internationally popular today, is the best legacy of his annihilated family. And it will remain so for long. 

Weinberg himself once told the devoted musicologist in Moscow, who has made a serious work on his life and legacy, Ljudmila Nikitina: “Everything that I composed is The Passenger. All of it”. The Passenger opera was created by Weinberg in 1967-1968, immediately after his lonely and painful visit to Poland when he was able to find at least some indicative information about his murdered family. Initially, the opera was expected to be performed at the Bolshoi theatre, but it had never happened. 

In a bit unusual for Soviet time approach, the authorities did not cancel the opera outright, but neither did they allow it to be performed. It was permanently postponed. Weinberg had no chance to hear and see his most  important opera on stage. Its Russian premiere, in a diminished concert version, occurred in 2006, marking the 10th anniversary of his passing,  and its  international premiere, with seriously changed original libretto, happened in 2010, fifteen years after his death, at the Bregenzer Music Festival in Austria. After that, The Passenger has become an international hit, with many performances of it on the best stages from Vienna and Frankfurt to New York and Chicago. For me personally, the one at the Opera National du Capitole in Toulouse is one of the deepest.  

The plot of The Passenger, semi-fictional novel by the Polish writer Zoya Posmysz, herself Auschwitz survivor, was about the post-war encounter of the former prisoner of Auschwitz with the German woman who was the camp’s guard during the war. When Zoya Posmysz wrote the novel in 1959, such encounters were happening in many places of the world. It was a very personal episode and, at the same time, it also was an existing dramatic and disturbing post-war world’s phenomenon. I know many of such encounters from my work with the Holocaust survivors and their families. 

The circle of destiny

For Weinberg, the theme of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Jewish tragedy caused by it was the epicenter of his entire music. It was the prism through which he heard , saw and created his word which has become widely known only after his passing, sadly. 

After The Passenger opera’s first international premiere in 2010 in Austria, not only this dramatic major work of Weinberg, but his ouevre in general, 150 compositions in different genres, including many symphonies, concerts, trios, and other instrumental music, has become very popular in the world, and has entered the repertoire of practically all leading musicians and orchestras world-wide. 

Sitting in the sold-out hall of the Philharmonic in Turku, with its fantastic orchestra, we were also very grateful to the public which was attentive, understanding and compassionate in its understated Finnish way. Everyone understood everything on that evening in January 2026, both musicians on the stage under the baton of Julian Rachlin, and so many people in the audience. The concert’s timing was also meaningful, it was just a month ahead of the 30th anniversary of Weinberg’s passing and just a few days before the International Holocaust Day. And although nothing of it had been emphasized specifically, everything was noted and  understood. 

Listening to the fine and precise way of the Turku musicians’ interpretation of the Shostakovich and Weinberg’s music, I was thinking  about the inter-crossings of time. We were listening to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony – the very same one which young 19-year old Metek Weinberg got to know as his first experience of the music by Shostakovich in 1941 in Minsk. And not only was he listening to it, but he was playing the piano and a couple of more parts of the great symphony at the concert. It was his very first meeting with Shostakovich’s music and it became a revelation for him, as Weinberg would repeatedly recall it. 

And we also were listening at the same concert to Weinberg’s punctuated and quietly emotional Sinfonietta No 1, op 41, which has the name, On Jewish Themes. 

This piece was composed by Weinberg in 1948, in the year when his father-in-law, great actor Solomon Michoels was murdered on Stalin’s order, and it was done after Michoel’s murder. The premiere of that very special piece of music happened in November 1948 in Kiev, under the baton of outstanding Soviet Jewish conductor Natan Rachlin. Rachlins are very well-known in former Soviet Union and beyond it dynasty of theatre directors and musicians, so it is quite probable that Julian is a distant relative of a legendary Soviet conductor who performed the premiere of Weinberg’s Sinfonietta No 1, which Julian brought to Finland in the same concert with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony almost 80 years later. 

Both composers, two close friends, both people with highly dramatic lives, by a masterly and respectful interpretation performed by able and caring musicians of the Turku Symphony Orchestra in Finland, were speaking to all of us without any distance of time. Because the soul of music does not know the past tense.  

The destiny of a big musical talent with a deeply tragic destiny now, decades after his passing, came to the circle which has brought Miezyslaw Weinberg and his family to universal attention, interest and love. All of which he had been deprived of during his life. This is comforting. Music, as no other art, has a high potency to create such incredible come-backs. As a rule, they are long-living. 

Part I can be read here. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)