Tribute to the outstanding composer on the 30th anniversary of his passing

Part I can be read here. 

Soviet years  and Shostakovich

Surviving alone, without  family and friends, young 20-year old Metek Weinberg did manage to cross the border into Soviet territory in the summer of 1939. He got to the Minsk conservatory, completed his studies there in 1941, and was very lucky to be evacuated to Tashkent as the war zone was getting extremely close to Minsk in no time. 

In Tashkent, within a large group of evacuated well-known musicians and artists, Weinberg got to know two colleagues who were close to Dmitry Shostakovich, and who were willing to show to the leading Soviet composer Weinberg’s First Symphony, a starting point of his serious music’s development.

A few weeks after Shostakovich received Weinberg’s First Symphony, he organised an official possibility for the  composer and his young wife to move to Moscow, which was not easy, doubly so during the war. 

Dmitry Shostakovich was a rare person, very decent and humanistic. Professionally, since he heard Weinberg’s music in 1943, he  immediately recognised his talent. But not less importantly, and in the case of the difficult and lonely life of Weinberg, Shostakovich took him under his wing  in a cordial and understated human way.  

The warm friendship of those two big composers blossomed for over 30 years, until the passing of Dmitry Shostakovich. Tellingly, after Shostakovich’s death in 1975, Weinberg was still in a very close and warm friendly relationship with his widow Irina, and it was her, along with a couple of friends , who did support aged and very sick , helpless in many respects Weinberg, in the end of his life. A noble human story of a true un-boasting friendship.  

Knowing Weinberg’s current fame and popularity, it really is hard to believe that he enjoyed only a decade of the 1960s of a satisfactory life, both professionally and otherwise.  

Back in Soviet times, Weinberg experienced quite a special treatment: his music was known to virtually everyone there because he was the author of many most popular melodies for widely beloved movies and cartoons, but very few people apart from the professional musical circles  associated that widely recognised music with that man, his other serious symphonic and modern instrumental  music.

In the USSR, even his name was something different from his native one. Coming to the USSR in a run for his life being twenty, and dying there at the age of 77, he lived almost all 57 years in the USSR as Moisei Vainberg, not as Miezyslaw Weinberg, although his friends and close circle still called him Metek, as his parents did. In the end of his life, he decided to change all his Soviet official documents for his Polish first name, Miezyslaw. He said that he felt it was important to get it back officially , too. 

His life was not easy in the USSR, not at all. We know that he was super-vigilant, nervous and unsure all the time, for years and decades. He was afraid to invoke any attention  from the side of the Big Brother. Who could blame him?

 Weinberg’s first wife happened to be the daughter of Solomon Michoels, great Russian and Soviet Yiddish actor, who was incredibly active internationally in organising the support for the USSR during the Second World War , only to be brutally murdered in 1948, in a typical Stalinist gangster way towards their own citizens. In early 1953, soon before Stalin’s death, Michoels’ cousin Miron Vovsi , who was a prominent doctor, the chief doctor of the Red........

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