Mieczysław Weinberg

Weinberg grew up in Warsaw, the son of a theatre musician in the city's large and lively Jewish community. In 1939 he graduated from the Warsaw Conservatoire and fled the German invasion in the only direction that seemed possible: to the USSR, where he made the acquaintance of Shostakovich and – on his advice – settled in Moscow. The relationship would be lifelong: Weinberg was, as he put it, Shostakovich's "pupil, his flesh and blood". With Shostakovich's support, Weinberg carved an utterly distinctive niche in Soviet music, and was duly condemned (along with Shostakovich) by Stalin's culture minister Zhdanov in 1948. In 1953, during a new wave of Soviet antisemitism, he was arrested, but was later released. His music is coloured by his experiences and the circumstances of the times; his 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets and numerous concertos and chamber works range in style from a bright neo-classicism (often coloured by the melodies of his Polish and Jewish heritage) to intensely inward melancholy. After Stalin's death Weinberg confronted his past ever more directly, and works such as his opera The Passenger (1968) and his massive Symphony No. 21 "Kaddish" (1991) have spearheaded a growing reappraisal of his life and work.