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.

David Fanning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, and Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. Author of books and articles on Shostakovich, Weinberg, Nielsen, and the 20th-century symphonic tradition, he is also prominent as a public musicologist, reviewer for Gramophone and writer of programme and liner notes. As a pianist he was for many years chamber-music partner of the Lindsay String Quartet and Quatuor Danel. Michelle Assay is the principal investigator of the Marie Curie/UK Research and Innovation-funded project, ‘Women and Western Art Music in Iran’, hosted at King’s College London and the University of Toronto, in partnership with UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage centre in France. Born in Tehran, she holds a PhD from the Sorbonne and University of Sheffield, with a dissertation on Hamlet in Stalin’s Russia, which she is currently preparing for publication by Routledge. She is the author of several prize-winning publications on Shakespeare’s Russian and Soviet afterlife. Michelle is chair and founder of the Shakespeare and Music Study Group, and of the GWAM (Global Western Art Music) network. She appears on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is a regular contributor to Gramophone magazine.