Mieczysław Weinberg

Polish-born, Soviet-domiciled composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996) is the 21st century’s most remarkable rediscovery in the field of art music. He enjoyed considerable renown in his adopted Russia from the 1940s to the 1970s. Subsequently, however, his reputation tailed off, as he increasingly became regarded as a Shostakovich epigone. As a composer of non-orthodox background, he was never marketed for export. It has taken the posthumous advocacy of top-class Western performers to fully reveal the quality of his music and its distinctiveness from the Shostakovich circle, not least in the areas of memory and memorialisation.

This edited volume of papers brings together musicologists, performers and personal acquaintances of the composer from Eastern, Central and Western Europe, the United States and Australia, to provide a state-of-the-art compendium of research on his life and music. Newly uncovered documentation is offered on Weinberg’s traumatic early years (which involved two narrow escapes from Nazi invasions) and his family background, along with reflections on identity, his place within 20th-century music history, and close readings of individual works, notably through the lens of intertextuality.