Mieczysław Weinberg

Until quite recently, Weinberg was just a name to most musicians and music lovers. Now he is increasingly regarded as one of the most important composers of the Soviet era after Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Born to a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1939; he soon fled to the USSR after the Nazi invasion of Poland. (Other members of his family were not so lucky.) There he met and befriended Shostakovich, who provided significant encouragement and help. In 1948 Weinberg was officially condemned alongside Shostakovich, and for a long time afterwards, although he found work writing music for films, his concert and operatic music was ignored. But by his death in 1996 interest had begun to grow, and it has continued to do so ever since. Weinberg’s output was huge, including 26 symphonies, 17 string quartets and seven operas, but the high quality is astonishingly consistent. In some ways a more fragile voice than Shostakovich, Weinberg too was able to reflect the anguish and turbulence of his times with devastating power.