Music as a memorial to a murdered nation
Aleksander LASKOWSKI
On the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it is worth remembering the figure of the brilliant composer and pianist Mieczysław Weinberg, who was in love with the works of Chopin.
.Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Moscow in 1996. His Jewish parents came to Poland as refugees from Besarabia, seeking a safe haven away from the threat of pogroms that had claimed the lives of some of their loved ones.
He grew up in Warsaw at the crossroads of two cultures – Polish and Jewish. In addition to accompanying his father, who worked as a violinist and composer in Jewish theatres, he also took piano lessons at the Warsaw conservatory from the age of twelve.
In September 1939, he fled from the Germans to Belarus. His parents and sister perished in the Holocaust. In Minsk, Weinberg studied musical composition with Vasily Zolotarev, one of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s many students. After Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, he moved to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. He was then invited by Dmitri Shostakovich, who was very much impressed by his First Symphony, to come to Moscow where he lived from 1943 until his death.
Mieczysław Weinberg left Warsaw as a young, promising pianist with a flair for composition to become a composer in the Soviet Union. His works were extraordinarily rich and varied – including not only classical pieces, but also music written for the cinema and the circus – but for a long time they were all but forgotten. They were performed only sporadically, especially after the composer’s death, and attracted few conductors, among them Vladimir Fedoseyev and Gabriel Chmura. There was also little interest in Weinberg’s work in the research community, with the exception of the Swedish musicologist Per Skans. After his death, the publisher Martin Anderson said: “Skans’ texts for the booklets accompanying the Olympia recordings of Weinberg’s music earned him the status of a recognised authority on the composer’s work; Skans was well aware that Weinberg deserved a more in-depth treatment, so he began work on a comprehensive biography”.
Following Skans’s death, Weinberg’s works drew the attention of the British musicologist and pianist David Fanning, who published his short biography Mieczysław Weinberg: In Search of Freedom in 2010. The publication was written for the Austrian festival Bregenzer Festspiel, which in 2010 hosted the world stage premiere of the opera Passenger, with a libretto based on a novella by Zofia Posmysz. The great success of that opera sparked interest in Mieczysław Weinberg and, above all, in his work. 2013 saw the publication of his first Polish biography written by Danuta Gwizdalanka under the title Mieczysław Weinberg. Kompozytor z trzech światów [Mieczysław Weinberg. A Composer from Three Worlds].
In addition to the world premiere of the Passanger, Bregenz also hosted a symposium on Mieczysław Weinberg’s works that same year. One of the topics discussed was the question of the composer’s identity. Among other things, the question is raised by the spelling of his surname and the sound of his name. The former varies from publication to publication, especially in music albums: Weinberg, Weinberg, Vaynberg, and Вайнберг. Writing in Polish, the composer spelled his name “Weinberg”.
As for Weiberg’s first name, the problem is more complex. The name on his birth certificate is “Mojsze”. Living in Poland before the war, he used the name “Mieczysław”. According to an anecdote quoted in the literature, the name “Moisiej” present on his Soviet documents was put there by a border guard when Weinberg crossed the border in 1939. To his family and friends he was „Mietek”, a fact that both is daughters like to mention.
How much was he part of Polish culture? In the case of writers the decisive factor is the language. If Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz had chosen to write in Russian, he would belong to Russian culture. Joseph Conrad had resolved to write in English and became an English writer. When it comes to composers, the matter is far from obvious, but the fact that Weinberg – who began to compose in earnest in Minsk, a city where the tradition of thinking in the romantic categories of the national schools was still very much alive – chose Polish texts for his major works seems to play an important role (even though the use of texts by Polish authors was perfectly in keeping with the Soviet Union’s cultural policy of “friendship between nations”, especially if the nations were from the eastern bloc).
Importantly, Mieczysław Weinberg spoke Polish fluently and often until the end of his life: “His Polish was beautiful, impeccable and typical of the pre-war Polish intelligentsia. He spoke fluently and used an extraordinarily rich vocabulary. During the two hours I spent with him, he was visibly animated and interested in our conversation,” says Eugeniusz Mielcarek, a Polish embassy employee who visited the seriously ill musician in 1994. “He stressed how much he hoped his works would be performed in Poland. I officially informed him that he had been awarded the distinction of Honour Meritorious for Polish Culture and asked him whether I could decorate him. He agreed. The ceremony was unconventional, but charged with feeling. As I pinned the decoration on his chest, I could see he was happy and openly emotional. I was not surprised when he began to reminisce about the Warsaw of his youth, the pre-war streets, cafes and restaurants that he had visited and where he had probably played […]. He told me that it was impossible for him to work creatively and how painful it was for a person at the height of his mental and artistic powers, full of creative ideas, to be completely prevented from putting them into practice for reasons of biology. »How are you coping, sir?« I asked. »Fortunately, there is still the great Polish music. I go over Chopin’s pieces in my mind and listen to Moniuszko’s operas every day«”.
Mieczysław Weinberg composed many of his works for Polish texts, including one of the most important – Symphony No. 8 Polish Flowers. But references to Poland and Polishness in Weinberg’s musical oeuvre go beyond the use of texts or the rhythms and melodies of Polish folk dances that are conspicuously present in works such as Polish Melodies, op. 47 No. 2 and Kujawiak and Oberek for two xylophones and orchestra (1952). Weinberg’s works also include symbolic references to Fryderyk Chopin and quotations from Chopin’s pieces as evidenced by the echo of the Funeral March fromthe Sonata in B minor in Symphony No. 8 Polish Flowers.
The most extensive quotations from Chopin can be found in Symphony No. 21 where Weinberg used a long fragment of the Ballade in G minor. Elena Dubinec, an American musicologist, gave an interesting interpretation of that musical quote: “Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Weinberg had no ties to Russian or Soviet culture. But when he arrived in the Soviet Union at the start of the Second World War, he quickly established such ties, taking a prominent place in the music circles of his new home. This is hardly something any emigrant can achieve. … Weinberg gained recognition in his new country thanks to his music. He was astonishingly successful in making a name for himself in the Soviet musical community, even though he did not get involved in politics and did not publicise the fact that he had been a victim of the Stalinist regime (although he had spent some time in prison) or a dissident. … Ethnicity is a sociological category that influences individual lives and the relationships between people, but is also often used as a means of self-identification. Some emigrant composers pragmatically turned their ethnicity into a commodity in order to gain social concessions and improve their situation. For example, many of those who emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel or the USA and had „Jewish nationality” written in box number five of their Soviet passports changed their style from blandly Soviet to distinctively Jewish to obtain support from the Jewish community.”
Dubinec believes that, in Weinberg’s case, the opposite was true – by using Jewish elements in his music, he could attract the attention of the censors and irritate the authorities (which actually happened in 1953, when he was arrested. Earlier, in 1948, Weinberg’s father-in-law, the great Jewish actor Soloman Michoels was murdered in a faked accident on Stalin’s orders).
“When Weinberg decided to write his Symphony No. 21,” Dubinec continues, „which became his last (completed) work in this genre, the Holocaust was already beginning to be openly discussed and taught in Russia. The composer had planned to call the work Kaddish, but decided against it later on. He dedicated the symphony to the 'memory of those who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto’, close to which he had spent his childhood. The idea for Symphony No. 21 was born as early as 1965, during the political thaw (when Weinberg started planning the Passenger and worked on the cantata The Diary of Love), but he did not begin composing until 1989 when Poland broke free as the first country of the Soviet bloc and started to implement market reforms. Weinberg’s symphony quotes a melody borrowed from Chopin. Is it just a memory of a childhood spent in Poland? If we assume that Weinberg was motivated solely by marketing considerations, we might think that he chose a quote from Chopin because he knew it would go down well in the Soviet Union, since Chopin’s music has always been popular there, regardless of the long-standing conflict between Russia and Poland. But Weinberg did not choose any odd fragment of Chopin’s music. He did not decide to use a mazurka or a typically Polish polonaise. In other words, he did not choose something that that could be classified as a charming piece of folklore. He quoted the main theme from the Ballade in G Minor. Op. 23, a work that, even in Chopin’s lifetime, was seen as a strong and serious manifestation of national feeling, rather than an ornament. The ballade genre itself was seen as telling a story – more specifically, the story of Poland’s struggle against the occupation of Warsaw by the army of the Russian Tsar Nicholas in 1831. Chopin began work on the Ballade immediately after these events. The main theme of the piece that Weinberg quotes is built around the sounds of the dominant in the third inversion, which are resolved only partially in anticipation of further variations. … With each repetition, the theme tells of another twist in the story. … In Chopin’s time, the language of German musical hegemony was understood by all. It was a language Chopin mastered to perfection and knew how to combine its basic form, the sonata, with the breath of a bard’s vision offered by the ballade. Like Chopin, who was fluent in a foreign musical idiom, Weinberg employed the language of his own time and place to convey his thoughts in a form that would be more accessible to an audience perfectly familiar with that language. In Weinberg’s time, the language that was universally understood was that of Shostakovich and Weinberg was glad to use it as both Shostakovich and his music were very close to his heart.”
In Symphony No. 21 Weinberg also quotes his String Quartet No. 4 in which David Fanning senses the presence of Polish motifs, and Elena Dubinec hears Jewish ones. What is important for the American researcher, however, is that the Quartet No. 4 was composed in 1945.
“It seems that what Weinberg transferred from the quartet to the symphony,” writes Dubinec, “was a symbol of Poland, his homeland that was destroyed during the Second World War, and a country where the tragedy of Poles and Jews became inextricably entwined. A country destroyed first by the Nazis, then by its Soviet 'liberators’. […] Weinberg chose Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor not only because he wanted to bring back the memories of his childhood in Poland. He chose this music as a memorial to a murdered nation. Paradoxically, when Chopin’s theme was expressed in a universal language, it became a symbol not only of Poland, which again found itself dominated by Russia a century after the work was originally composed, but also of the Jewish nation exterminated on Polish soil.”
.In addition to Elena Dubinec’s opinion, it is worth quoting that of the Jewish-Russian musicologist Mikhail Bialik, who was a friend of Mieczysław Weinberg and discussed the question of his cultural roots with him on many occasions. During the Bregenz symposium in 2010, Bialik told me: “Julian Tuwim was by far his favourite poet. He always felt Polish. Poland was his life and his home. That’s where his heart was. Chopin’s heart is in the Church of the Holy Cross at Krakowskie Przedmieście in Warsaw. Weinberg’s heart, whose beating can be heard in his music, was always in Poland. Poland was his homeland. That’s who Weinberg was.”
