Full Description
Polish-born, Soviet-domiciled composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) 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.
Scholarly enquiry has burgeoned in recent years, though less conspicuously. 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.
Contents
List of Illustrations 1. David Fanning and Michelle Assay, Weinberg Research: Absence and Abundance
BIOGRAPHY 2. Victoria Bishops, A Non-standard Papa: Life with Mieczysław Weinberg 3. Antonina Klokova, Biographical Texts about Mieczysław Weinberg: Peculiarities and Challenges of a Biography as a Research Method 4. Verena Mogl, Pieces of a Life Untold: Weinberg's Early Biography 5. Inessa Dvuzhilnaya, Weinberg in Belorussia 6. Bret Werb, Weinberg in Washington DC: with some Observations on the Composer's Father, Shmuel Weinberg
IDENTITIES 7. Daniel Elphick, Weinberg and the Warsaw Autumn Festival: Reactive Modernism and Nostalgia 8. Nicky Gluch, Shamor Vzachor: Observing and Remembering Mieczysław Weinberg 9. Levon Habokian, Weinberg as a 'Bronze Age' Figure, or Why was Weinberg not Appreciated in his Lifetime?
POETRY, SYMPHONY AND STAGE,
10. Aleksander Laskowski, Julian Tuwim and Mieczysław Weinberg 11. Agnieszka Nowok-Zych, Song of the Survivor? Some Thoughts about Weinberg's Ninth Symphony, 'Lines that Escaped Destruction', Op. 93 12. Stefan Weiss, Mieczysław Weinberg's Settings of Shakespeare's Sonnets 13. Dmitry Abaulin, Soviet and Non-Soviet: Weinberg and his Contemporaries at the Moscow State Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre.
MUSICAL LANGUAGE AND INTERTEXTUALITY,
14. Christoph Flamm, Weinberg's Chamber Music with Piano 15. David Fanning, Weinberg's Cooking-pot and the Quotation Cube
KEEPING WEINBERG ALIVE,
16. Tommy Persson, Meeting and Promoting Weinberg 17. Gidon Kremer, Performing Weinberg
