 |
 |
|
|
         |
| Composers Biography |  |
|
 |
                          |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
Moisei Vainberg
[ Life | Works | Photo Gallery | Home Page] |
 |
| Vainberg was born, as Mieczyslaw Weinberg, on 8 December 1919 in Warsaw, into a musical family: his father was a composer and violinist in a Jewish theatre there. He made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of ten, and two years later became a student at the Warsaw Academy of Music, then under the direction of Szymanowski, where he took piano lessons from Josef Turczynski.His graduation in 1939 was soon followed by Hitler's invasion: when his entire family was killed, burned alive, Moisei fled eastwards, taking shelter first in Minsk, where he studied composition with Vassily Zolotaryov. Two years later, as Hitler now pushed into Russia, Vainberg again had to flee, this time finding work at the opera house in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan. It was there, in 1943, that he took the action that was perhaps to be the most decisive in his life: he sent the manuscript of his newly completed First Symphony to Shostakovich in Moscow.Shostakovich's response was typically helpful and immediate: Vainberg received an official invitation to travel to Moscow, where he was to spend the rest of his life, living largely by his compositions, though he also made many appearances as a pianist. One of the most prestigious was when, in October 1967, with Vishnevskaya, Oistrakh and Rostropovich, he played in the first performance of Shostakovich's Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok, replacing the ailing composer. And when Shostakovich presented his latest works to the Composers' Union and to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, it was generally in four-hand versions in which Vainberg was his habitual accompanist. Having only just escaped the Nazis with his life, Vainberg was not to find matters much easier under Stalin. During the night of 12 January 1948 (the day before the opening of the infamous "Zhdanov" congress at which Shostakovich, Prokofieff and several other composers were denounced as "formalists"), Solomon Mikhoels, Vainberg's father-in-law and the perhaps the foremost actor in the Soviet Union, was murdered on Stalin's orders, an early victim of the anti-Semitic campaign that was to be a feature of his last years in power.When, in February 1953, Vainberg himself was arrested, it seemed that he, too, might "disappear"; fortune intervened and Stalin's death on 5 March removed the imminent danger. A month later Mikhoels was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet press, and soon after Vainberg himself was released. He spent his last days confined to bed by ill health, often in considerable pain and afflicted by a deep depression occasioned by the wholesale neglect of his music - an unworthy end to a career the importance of which has yet to be recognised.
|
| The list of Vainberg's compositions is enormous and deserves serious investigation both by musicians and record companies: there are no fewer than 26 symphonies (the last to be completed, Kaddish, is dedicated to the memory of the Jews who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, Vainberg donating the manuscript to the Yadva-Shem memorial in Israel; the twenty-seventh was finished in piano score though not fully orchestrated); two sinfoniettas; seven concertos (variously for violin, cello, flute and trumpet); seventeen string quartets; nineteen sonatas for piano solo or in combination with violin, viola, cello, double-bass or clarinet; more than 150 songs; a Requiem; and an astonishing amount of music for the stage -- seven operas, three operettas, two ballets, and incidental music for 65 films, plays, radio productions and circus performances.
|
|
||
|