Mieczyslaw Weinberg

Moisey [Mieczysław] Samuilovich Weinberg [Vaynberg],
(b Warsaw, 8 Dec 1919; d Moscow, 2 Feb 1996). Russian composer of Polish origin.

He began writing music in early childhood and at the age of 10 played the piano in the theatre where his father worked. Two years later he entered the Warsaw Conservatory where he studied with Jozef Turczinski, who had been a pupil of Osipova in St Petersburg. Weinberg’s pianistic talent was noticed by Joseph Hoffman who arranged for the boy to study in America, a plan which was forestalled by the outbreak of World War II. Weinberg then emigrated to the Soviet Union. Although he had written his first two compositions in Poland (the Berceuse for piano and the First String Quartet, of 1935–7), serious study only began in 1939 when he joined Zolotaryov’s class at the Minsk Conservatory, graduating in 1941. During the war he settled in Tashkent where he married the daughter of the actor and director of the Jewish Theatre, Solomon Mikhoels. It was then he met Shostakovich whose ideas about music shattered Weinberg’s conception of art: ‘It was as if I had been born anew …. Although I took no lessons from him, Dmitri Shostakovich was the first person to whom I would show each of my new works’ [Nikitina]. This friendship lasted until Shostakovich’s death.