The music of Moisei (Mieczysław) Weinberg (1919–1996) presents itself as one of the most wonderful chapters in the genuine musical history of the 20th century which, alas, has not been written down in full. For a long time Weinbergremained somewhat under the shadow of Dmitri Shostakovich and, erroneously considered his imitator. However, within historical perspective it was the spirit and not the matter of Shostakovich’s musical art had nourished this powerful and independent personality. In his own turn, the elder colleague, the person, whom Weinberg considered to be his mentor, owes a lot to his “pupil” in regards to the spiritual, creative, as well as narrowly-professional influences.
Weinberg’s biography is still full of “blank spots” up to now. He was born in Warsaw on December 8, 1919; his father was a composer and a violinist in a moving Jewish theater. At the age of nine, Weinberg had performed at a concert as a pianist for the first time; two years later he was accepted to the Warsaw Academy of Music, from which he graduated in 1939, majoring in piano. Weinberg’s teacher was the famous pianist, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, a co-editor of Chopin’s complete edition, Juzef Turczyński.
The eruption of World War II compelled Weinberg to flee to the East, to the USSR. The young musician’s family, which had remained in Poland, perished. From 1939 to 1941 Weinberg studied composition at the Belorussian State Conservatory (with a pupil of Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov, professor Vassily Zolotaryov).
What followed was, once again, war, an evacuation to Tashkent, a letter to Dmitri Shostakovich with the “enclosure” of the score of the First Symphony and an invitation to Moscow, initiated by the latter, where Weinberg had lived from 1943 and right up to his death on February 26, 1996. In January, 1953 Weinberg was arrested and thrown into prison. The reason was simple: his first wife was the daughter of the great Jewish actor, Solomon Mikhoels and the niece of the leading “figurant” of the famous “Doctors’ case”, Miron Vovsi. Just as many others, Weinberg’s life had been saved only by the death of the dictator Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, the circumstances of Weinberg’s fate subsequently (after his death) have become a cause for a somewhat speculative interest in him as “a victim of Nazism, Communism and anti-semitism”.
Especially striking is the sudden creative advance of Weinberg in the mid-1940’s: from the First Symphony, Op. 10 (1942), a “rather naive and traditional” work (according to Ludmila Nikitina, the author of a book about Weinberg’s symphonies) to the Piano Quintet, Op. 18 (1944), the Fourth String Quartet, Op. 20 (1945), the Sixth String Quartet, Op. 35 (1946) and the lyrical vocal pieces with chamber accompaniment, out of which most prominent are two cycles of “Jewish Songs”, set to the texts of Yitzhak-Leibusch Perez (Op. 13, from 1943) and Samuil Galkin (Op. 17, from 1944) – the above mentioned compositions feature Weinberg’s unique style.
A considerable portion of Weinberg’s life has been spent close to Shostakovich. “I always feel a sense of pride, when in discussions, presentations and in the press I am called a pupil of Shostakovich, though I did not take a single lesson from him, but only had regularly showed him all of my opus-numbered compositions, starting from my First Symphony, in household conditions”, – Weinberg wrote. Two of Shostakovich’s impulses played an important role in the formation of Weinberg’s individual style. The first one – that of Neo-Classicism – was connected with the virtuosic approach to chamber ensembles, not only within the framework of chamber, but also of orchestral music. The second one – having to do with the interaction of the genres of vocal and instrumental music and the composition of programmatic symphonies on this basis (including those which incorporated vocal lines) – was inherited by Weinberg and Shostakovich from Gustav Mahler. Besides Shostakovich, other influences could be discerned in Weinberg’s music – those of musical compositions by Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Hindemith.
The question of the interaction of the styles of Weinberg and Shostakovich had been examined for a long time in a very one-sided, primitive fashion – as the influence of the elder master on the younger one. In the present day, it has become totally apparent that the opposite was also true: particularly the two cycles of “Jewish Songs” by Weinberg had influenced the style and language of Shostakovich’s vocal cycle “From the Jewish Folk Poetry”; practically simultaneously (during the years 1962–1963), in a creative dialogue Shostakovich’s Thirteenth’s Symphony (“Babiy Yar”) and Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony (Op. 79) had appeared; apparent traces of the same Sixth Symphony could be discerned in Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto (1966), the Second Violin Concerto (1967), as well as the “Malagenye” of the subsequent Fourteenth Symphony (1969).
To a certain extent Weinberg presents himself as a “distilled” Shostakovich: the latter’s chamber stylist features are carried to an extreme sharpness and refinery. Very characteristic are two reviews by Nikolai Myaskovsky of Weinberg’s music from the mid-1940’s. According to the reviewer, the First Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 12 (1943) “is written in a very consistent linear-polyphonic manner with a distinctly marked constructivistic devices”. In the Sixth String Quartet, Op. 35 (1946) “the musical images <…> and technique <…> are complex, nonetheless they are concise and expressive”. Both orchestral and chamber music – two courses of Weinberg’s musical style – are developed by him in a parallel manner. In his chamber compositions the composer had found his individual style more quickly. In the composer’s symphonic output there is a telltale pause – between 1949 (the Third Symphony) and 1957 (the Fourth Symphony): it had been caused not only by personal reasons, but by external ones – the devastation of the Russian musical scene, created by the notorious Decree of 1948. During those years the composer had written a lot of suite-like compositions, predominantly based on folklore material. They include Two Moldavian Rhapsodies (one for violin and orchestra and the other for orchestra), “Polish Melodies” (Suite for Orchestra) and other such compositions. Subsequently, this “folklore-suite” tendency will be organically instilled into his orchestral music.
Weinberg is the composer of 22 large symphonies (the last one remained unfinished) and four chamber symphonies, 17 string quartets and numerous sonatas for various instruments (among them a series of sonatas for solo violin, viola and cello).
The extraordinary plasticity of melodic lines, frequently, very simple ones at their base, which, nevertheless, assemble into a fancy mosaic, the exploration of the unlimited possibilities, inherent in small ensembles is a strong feature not only of the composer’s chamber output, but also of his orchestral output. The latter contains three basic discernible features: non-programmatic symphonies for large orchestras, symphonies for smaller instrumental ensembles, bordering on chamber music (sometimes containing the subtitle “chamber symphony”, while in other cases – like in the Seventh Symphony for string orchestra with harpsichord, or the Tenth Symphony for 17 string instruments – without such a subtitle), and, finally, symphonies with a programmatic content (including those, which incorporate the chorus).
The characteristic features of the composer’s talent made themselves manifested in theatrical music as well – for instance, in the chamber operas “The Portrait” following Gogol’s short-story, “The Idiot”, following Dostoyevsky’s novel, “The Madonna and the Soldier”, following V. Bogomolov and “The Lady Passenger”, following the story with the same name by Polish writer Zofia Posmysz.
Weinberg is also well-known as the composer of incidental music – for radio programs, theatrical performances, outstanding movies (among which are “The Cranes are Flying” by Mikhail Kalatozov, from 1957, “The Last Inch” by Theodor Vulfovich and Nikita Kurikhin, from 1958), as well as cartoons.
By the will of fate, Weinberg had been placed “at the crossroads” of three cultures – the Polish, Jewish and Russian, – and the images of these cultures he had enthusiastically upheld throughout all of his life. (A symbolic sign is the quotation from Chopin’s First Ballade in his posthumous Twenty-first Symphony, dedicated to the Jews who were perished in the Warsaw Ghetto). This could also be seen in the composer’s preferences of poetry. The most important Polish poet in the context of Weinberg’s musical output, is Julian Tuwim: a large number of compositions has been written to his poetry, including the Eighth Symphony (“The Flowers of Poland”), Op. 83 (1964), and the Ninth Symphony (“The Surviving Verses”), Op. 93 (1967). Weinberg shared with Tuwim the fate of a refugee (after the Nazis’ assault on Poland, Tuwim was forced to emigrate to the USA). Weinberg had also written music to poems by Jewish poets (Y.-L. Perez, Lev Kvitko, Samuil Galkin), the Russian classic poets: Vassily Zhukovsky, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tutchev and Alexander Blok, as well as numerous Soviet poets.
The theme of war is one of the most highlighted in the composer’s music. In its treatment Weinberg is peculiar: he is no a chronicler, who presents pictures of suffering and horror, not a denouncing tribune, but a lyricist; the dramatic element presents itself as a sort of “underlying theme” for the lyricism; the suffering, pain and anguish are directed inwards. A striking example of this is presented in the Sixth Symphony (1962–1963), one of such compositions, in which the horrors of war are portrayed through the suffering of children. It is connected in this manner with the cantata “A Diary of Love”, Op. 87 (1965), written in memory of the children, who perished in Auschwitz, as well as a number of his compositions, written at a later period of his life.
During the composer’s lifetime, his compositions had been performed by outstanding Russian musicians: the conductors, Kirill Kondrashin (and the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, which he directed) and Rudolf Barshai (with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra), the cellists Daniil Shafran and Mstislav Rostropovich (the first performer of the composer’s Cello Concerto and the Twenty-four Variations for solo cello), violinists David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan (the first performer of the Violin Concerto), pianist Emil Gilels (the first performer of the Piano Quintet and Fourth Sonata), as well as the Borodin State String Quartet. Weinberg’s operas were performed in the Small (Maly) Opera Theater in Leningrad as well as in the Chamber Musical Theater under the direction of Boris Pokrovsky in Moscow.
During his last years the composer was very much grieved about the gradual loss of interest to his music. However, with the emergence of the new century the situation is somewhat changing towards the better: Weinberg’s music is being performed in Russia, Europe and the USA, and this interest is caused exclusively by his wonderful music.
The Fourth Symphony in A minor, Op. 61 (1957, second version, 1961)
Written eight years after the Third Symphony, the Fourth became an intersection between the symphonic trend proper and the trend of suites in Weinberg’s music. the sources of the Fourth Symphony lie in the folklore suites of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, as well as in the First Sinfonietta, opus 41 (1948).
Similarly to Prokofiev in his First (“Classical”) Symphony or Shostakovich in his Ninth Symphony, Weinberg’s Fourth Symphony presents itself as a peculiar stylized “playing the classics”: this is manifested by the precision and laconicism of the form (the work’s duration is less than 30 minutes), “a mosaic (…) of images, reflected in various types of movement” (L. Nikitina), a brightly expressed theatrical aspect, which imparts features of a concerto for orchestra to the composition. It is not by chance that in the first edition, each of the work’s movements was endowed with a title: respectively, Toccata, Intermezzo, Serenade and Rondo. In the second edition the composer withdrew the titles: it is possible that the content of each of the movements did not correspond in full measure with the titles. The development of the material in the first movement (Allegro), despite the inherent sonata form, resembles a baroque formal model more than a classical one. The initial impulse is presented by the passages of the string orchestra in unison, played by the string orchestra (the beginning of the theme of the primary theme group) overgrows and becomes more complex by the counterpoint of the trumpets and woodwinds, finally leading in an imperceptible way into the subsidiary theme group (first stated by the dialogue of the of the clarinet and the horn). The development is splendid; in it, along with a compression of the thematic material in a contrasting polyphony, there also appears a new theme – of a somewhat marionette-like parody march, played by the woodwinds. In the recapitulation it is joined into a general intonational complex.
The second movement (Allegretto, in B flat minor) likewise possesses a brightly theatrical vein; the sources of genre could be perceived in its themes. The first theme, performed by the clarinet, somewhat resembles a melancholy waltz, while the second theme, which is derived from the bass line of the first theme) brings in a dramatic element (the violins are accompanied by a lamento motive of the violas). In the central episode of the form, once again, just as in the development of the first movement, the marionette-like march appears, in which the flute, tambourine and double-bass are prominent, which is anticipated by military-sounding signals of the trumpet.
The third movement of the symphony, Adagio, in D minor presents itself as a gem of Weinberg’s lyricism. The introductory theme of the horn leads forward to an intimate type of song (played by the cello to the accompaniment of the other strings, playing pizzicato), recreating the spirit of Mahler or Bruckner (the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony). In a subtle and imperceptible manner this theme “flows into” the second theme – a Jewish folk tune (performed by a solo clarinet). In the subsequent development, both themes are drawn together.
The influence of the folklore-suite component in Weinberg’s music is very perceptible in the Finale (Vivace, in A major). Both of its themes possess a dance-like character. The form of the Finale combines the features of sonata form, a Rondo-like structure and variation form (dispersed double variations). An intricate rhythmic and modal variation (with an active utilization of diatonic modes), a neo-folkloristic type of imitation of music-making by folk musicians, while the frequent ostinati of the harmony present a trace of the influence of the music of Bela Bartok on Weinberg’s compositions.
The world premiere of the Fourth Symphony took place in Moscow on October 16, 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kirill Kondrashin.
The Sixth Symphony in A minor, Op. 79 (1962–1963) for a chorus of boys and full symphonic orchestra. Set to the poems of Lev Kvitko, Samuil Galkin and Mikhail Lukonin.
Having been written at the same time as Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony corresponds with it by likewise expressing the theme of suffering, caused by war. Both for Shostakovich and Weinberg these sufferings are in many ways connected with the tragedy of the Jewish people. However, Shostakovich’s interpretation is much more publicistic, whereas Weinberg’s is much more intimate. The choice of the poets, whose poetry is set to music, is exemplary: Shostakovich turned to the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko with his harsh placard style and his strong aversion to dictatorships and antisemites, while Weinberg turned to Lev Kvitko (“Little Violin”, from the cycle of children’s poems, presents itself as an intricate stylization of folk poetry), Samuil Galkin (“A ditch was built within the red clay…”) depicts a picture of the destruction of a home and shooting of children, which is frightening in its down-to-earth qualities). However, neither Kvitko nor Galkin possess any attributes of nationality: the Jewishness is implied, but not named. Let us add that the destinies of the poets themselves are no less tragic than the destinies of their characters: Kvitko was shot by the Soviet secret police in 1952, while Samuil Galkin was able to leave prison in his due time (he died in 1960). The third poem – “Sleep, people” by Mikhail Lukonin – deserves special mention. This presents itself as a typical example of bad Soviet poetry, with its four-point gait qualities, readily-made, false clichés and a concluding maxim, very much in the vein of the officially imposed “struggle for peace” (“Sleep, people, rest, the sun will rise, / Violins will sing about peace on earth”). It is difficult to say, to what degree was the incorporation of this text into the symphony dictated by considerations of censorship or by artistic considerations. In any case, the contrast of the music with the poetry in the last movement is absolutely striking. “Life goes on”, – as people say in this regards, – but there is no more life.
The transparent poetic images of the symphonies – children, the violin (as a symbol of life), war, silence and sleep (as symbols of peace) – have determined the logic of construction of this five-movement cycle. The first and third movements are purely symphonic, while the second, fourth and fifth movements incorporate a chorus of boys. A giant arch is created by the first and fifth movements; the instrumental coda of the latter contain the most exact thematic reminiscences of the first movement. A smaller arch is presented by the second and fourth movements, endowed with their crucial antithesis (the rejoicing children and the suffering children); the central scherzo depicts the menacing and ugly face of war.
The main thematicism of the symphony is focused in the initial Adagio, containing a Rondo-sonata form: a lamento theme, played by the horn (according to Ludmila Nikitina, somewhat similar to the melody of a peasant’s lament from the first movement of Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra”), a doleful theme of the primary theme group (based on an incessantly recurring short motive), a fanfare theme, which first sounded out in the flute’s cadenza (the first episode). These themes recur fully or in part throughout all the symphony’s movements.
The lyrical-narrative and even philosophical tone of the symphony has determined its orchestral color: Weinberg avoids a blunt depiction of the tragic in his “physiological” tutti, even in the Scherzo. Shostakovich’s artistic devices – the revelation of the tragic “reverse side” of the aspects of the grotesque and of genre – are even more acute in Weinberg’s music: one of the themes from the Scherzo reminds one of a frightening freilechs, a second theme resembles either a gallop or a cancan, while a third theme (presented by the piccolo clarinet) depicts an ugly waltz, which is regularly interrupted by the timpani… The orchestral dramaturgy of the symphony is intriguing and varied: it features “character-themes” (a solo violin, children’s voices), as well as a modification of the intonations of the motives (the cold-sounding “fanfare” of the flutes in the first movement, which sounds in the trumpet in the culmination moment of the transition from the Scherzo to the fourth movement), as well as the combination of the extreme (high and low) timbres.
Weinberg’s Sixth is a symphony with two Finales, one of them tragic (the fourth movement), and the other one relatively optimistic (the fifth movement). In this innuendo one could perceive the pain and the spiritual force of the composer of a work, about which Dmitri Shostakovich had said: “I wish I could sign my name to this symphony”.
The world premiere of the Sixth Symphony took place in Moscow on November 12, 1963 by the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and the Boys’ Chorus of the Moscow Choral College with choirmaster Yuri Ulanov, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin.
Mikhail Segelman
The texts, utilized in M. Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony
Second movement
Lev (Leib) Kvitko (1890–1952). Translated from the Yiddish by Mikhail Svetlov (1903–1964)
LITTLE VIOLIN
The Fourth Movement
Samuil Galkin (1897–1960). Translated from the Yiddish by Vera Potapova (Dligach) (1910–1992).
Fifth Movement
Mikhail Lukonin (1918–1976)
Translation: Anton Rovner
