Mieczysław Weinberg (December 8, 1919 – February 26, 1996) was a Polish, Soviet, and Russian composer and pianist. Born in Warsaw to parents who worked in the Yiddish theatre in Poland, his early years were surrounded by music. At the age of 12, he began formal music lessons. Later, he studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1939, Weinberg fled Warsaw when Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. His family was later murdered at the Trawniki concentration camp.
Weinberg found refuge in the Soviet Union. He established himself successfully in Moscow with support from Dmitri Shostakovich and the Committee on the Arts. Postwar changes in Soviet cultural policy led to increased persecution of minority groups, including Jews. Although Weinberg's music was well regarded and regularly played, he was surveilled and harassed by the MVD. On February 6, 1953, Weinberg was arrested and jailed at Lubyanka Prison. Intercession on his behalf by Shostakovich and Stalin's death led to Weinberg's release on April 25.
The 1960s were the peak of Weinberg's professional success. Aside from his concert works, his music for film also became well known. His score for Fyodor Khitruk's cartoon Winnie-the-Pooh was an immediate success and the verses sung by its titular character entered the Russian popular lexicon.
In the 1970s, Weinberg's career began to decline, in spite of increased official distinctions. He continued to compose prolifically through the 1980s, but health problems aggravated by the loss of state patronage and healthcare that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union left him bedridden in his final years. Belated recognition of his music outside of Russia began in the 1990s through the advocacy of Tommy Persson, a Swedish judge. In 1994, Poland awarded Weinberg the Meritorious Activist of Culture. He converted to Orthodox Christianity a few weeks before his death.
Spelling and transliteration of name Weinberg's name was registered on his birth certificate as Mojsze Wajnberg. Throughout his adult life, he signed his letters in Polish using the Polish spelling of his surname. During his career in the Yiddish theater of interwar Warsaw, he was known by the German spelling of his name, Mosze Weinberg; a typical convention of the time for Polish musicians who aspired to produce recordings for export. Weinberg adopted the given name Mieczysław professionally at the beginning of his musical career because he believed it sounded more Polish and prestigious.
In the Soviet Union, he was officially known as Moisei Samuilovich Vainberg (). The name was the result of legal expediency and his personal indifference when he sought to cross the border into the Soviet Union in 1939:
The order came to let the refugees in. Some kind of squad was put together to examine the documents, but quite carelessly, because there were a lot of people. When they came up to me, I was asked: "Last name?"—"Weinberg"—"First?"—"Mieczysław"—"'Mieczysław', what is that? You Jewish?"—"Jewish"—"So 'Moisei' you will be".
In the 1980s, he successfully petitioned to have his legal first name changed back to Mieczysław (). Among friends in Russia, he would also go by his Polish diminutive "Mietek".
Re-transliteration of the composer's surname from Cyrillic back into the Latin alphabet produces a variety of spellings. "Vainberg" became the most common in the 1990s because of a series of compact disc releases on the Olympia label. Per Skans, the author of their liner notes, had erroneously believed that this was the composer's favored choice. Starting in the 21st century, "Weinberg" became the most widespread spelling. However, there is no evidence that the composer preferred that spelling.
Biography Youth Weinberg was born in Warsaw on December 8, 1919. His father, , was a well-known conductor, composer, and violinist at the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. He had originally come from Kishinev, Bessarabia Governorate (today part of Moldova), which he left shortly before its Jewish community was attacked in the pogrom of 1903, in the course of which Weinberg's grandparents and great-grandparents were killed. Weinberg's mother, Sara (née Sura Dwojra Sztern or Sara Deborah Stern), was Szmuel's second wife. She had been born in Odesa, Kherson Governorate (today part of Ukraine), and was an actress in several Yiddish theater companies in Warsaw and Łódź. One of the composer's cousins, Isay Abramovich Mishne, was the secretary of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the , and was executed in 1918 along with the other 26 Baku Commissars.
The Weinberg's family home was located in the Wola district, on . From an early age, Weinberg was surrounded by music; he later said that "life was [his] first music teacher". At the age of six, he began to accompany his father to musical performances. He taught himself to play the piano at an early age and eventually developed sufficient skill to substitute for his father as conductor at the Jewish Theatre. Weinberg also began to compose, although he did not accord these early works importance:
What does writing music mean to a child? I simply took down one of my father's music sheets and scribbled down something or other... But in this way, I studied music right from my birth, as it were. And when I wrote these "operettas" I probably imagined myself to be a composer.
At the age of 12, Weinberg began formal music lessons at a school in Warsaw. His teacher noted his precocity and enrolled him at the Warsaw Conservatory in October 1931, where she felt his talent would be more suitably developed. The identities of Weinberg's teachers during his first two years at the conservatory are no longer known, but in 1933 he became a student of Józef Turczyński, who considered Weinberg to be one of his best students along with Witold Małcużyński. Weinberg graduated in 1939.
Weinberg made his professional debut in a chamber concert organized by the Polish Society for Contemporary Music on December 10, 1936, wherein he was the pianist for the world premiere of Andrzej Panufnik's Piano Trio. His next appearance was in mid-1937, as one of the musicians that performed at the conservatory's annual graduation concert. The students who received diplomas at the event included Witold Lutosławski, Stefan Kisielewski, and Zbigniew Turski. The latter's Piano Concerto was included on the concert program; Weinberg was the soloist. A reviewer praised him as the best performer at the concert and described his playing as "truly manly". That same year, Weinberg also composed music for an early film by , , in which he made a brief appearance as a pianist. The film also included songs by his father, who may have conducted the ensemble used for the film's soundtrack.
In May 1938, Weinberg was introduced by Turczyński to his friend, the pianist Josef Hofmann, who held the post of honorary professor at the conservatory and who was then touring Poland. Weinberg played for him Johann Sebastian Bach's Italian Concerto and Mily Balakirev's Islamey. Impressed, Hofmann invited Weinberg to study with him at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, for which he promised to obtain an American visa. Ultimately, Weinberg decided to pursue a career as a composer rather than pianist. In the event, he was unable to accept Hofmann's offer because of the invasion of Poland in 1939; Weinberg referred to this as having marked the end of "the best and happiest period" of his life.
Escape from Poland
Despite the outbreak of war, Weinberg maintained his daily routine and believed the assurances of Polish propaganda that Poland would emerge victorious against Germany's invasion. Late night on September 6, 1939, Weinberg returned home from the Café Adria, where he worked as a pianist. As he ate the meal that his mother had prepared for him, he heard a radio announcement from Roman Umiastowski that the Wehrmacht had broken through Polish defenses and urged all able-bodied men to join the Polish Army. The broadcast set off a panic in Warsaw. The next morning, Weinberg left with his sister and headed eastwards towards the Soviet Union. In mid-journey, his sister decided to return home because her shoes were badly hurting her feet. Weinberg never saw her and his parents again. It was not until 1966, during his only subsequent trip to Poland, that he learned from surviving former neighbors that his family had been murdered at the Trawniki concentration camp.
Weinberg's trek to the Soviet Union took him seventeen days. He escaped wartime dangers along the way, but witnessed other refugees who did not and died. One incident occurred near the Soviet–Polish border:
Two or three Jews were walking along the road; their clothing revealed that they were Jews. In that moment, a motorcycle came along. A German got off and, from the gesticulation, we understood that he was asking for the way somewhere. They showed him precisely... He probably said "Danke schön", sat down again, started the engine, and as the Jews resumed walking, to send them on their way he threw a hand grenade, which tore them to shreds. I could have easily died the same way. On the whole, dying was easy.
On October 3, Weinberg arrived at the border. He recalled the gratitude that he and other refugees felt and that they "blessed the Red Army which could save [them] from death".
Refugee in the Soviet Union
Weinberg arrived in the Soviet Union with few personal belongings aside from some of his musical manuscripts and family photographs. His poor health excluded him from consideration for military service. It is believed that before he settled in Minsk, he first journeyed through Brest, then Pinsk, and Luninets; he composed his Piano Sonata No. 1 in the latter town, which he nicknamed the work after. Weinberg and other recent Polish immigrants were granted Soviet citizenship by local authorities in Minsk. This permitted him the privilege to enroll at the Minsk Conservatory. He became one of Vasily Zolotarev's composition students. Weinberg also studied counterpoint, music history, harmony, orchestration, and conducting. His classmates included Eta Tyrmand, , and . According to , Weinberg was considered the best student. He settled into a room at the conservatory's dormitory. His roommate was , a pianist and alumnus of Heinrich Neuhaus. Klumov gave lessons in the Russian language to Weinberg, who quickly became fluent. After school, Weinberg worked as a pianist. He sometimes partnered in duet with Tyrmand, with whom he played medleys of themes from popular American films.
Zolotarev had been taught composition by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and, through him, inherited the traditions of the Mighty Handful, particularly their use of folk music idioms. In turn, Weinberg absorbed these influences and began turning to Jewish folklore and music for inspiration. Pleased at the young man's abilities, Zolotarev described Weinberg as "a charming and handsome young man, very (extraordinarily) talented". Concern for Weinberg's health and finances led Zolotarev to solicit help for him from the Committee on the Arts. This led to Weinberg being sent to Moscow as one of the participating delegates for the Festival of Byelorussian Art in June 1940. Through Klumov, Weinberg was introduced to Nikolai Myaskovsky:
I remember how astonished I was [at meeting Myaskovsky], this first impression stayed with me my whole life. I was twenty years old back then and he was in his fifties, I think. He seemed a little old man to me. As I made to leave, he suddenly picked up my coat and helped me. I was completely dumbfounded and my hands trembled: "What are you doing, what are you doing?" And he uttered a famous phrase to me: "That is how we do things around here".