WEINBERG Life &Times

1919

LIFE: Mieczys¯aw Weinberg is born on 8 December in Warsaw, Poland. His father is a theatre director, composer and pianist, and his mother is also a pianist. TIMES: Pianist and composer Ignacy

Jan Paderewski is appointed prime minister of the newly independent Poland, which he represents at the Paris Peace Conference.

1953

LIFE: Amid an anti-semitic campaign instigated by Stalin, Weinberg is arrested on charges of ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalism’. Shostakovich writes to the authorities on his behalf. TIMES: Joseph Stalin and composer Sergei Prokofiev die on the same day: 5 March. After a six-month power struggle, Nikita Khrushchev emerges as the new leader of the Soviet Union.

1967

LIFE: When the composer falls ill, he plays the piano in the premiere of Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok with soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist David Oistrakh. TIMES: The Beatles release their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Stockhausen is among the 71 figures depicted on the cover, designed by Peter Blake and Jann Howarth.

1939

LIFE: Following Germany’s invasion of Poland, he flees to the Soviet Union. His parents and sister stay behind. They perish in the Trawniki concentration camp. TIMES: Georg Elser, a carpenter, tries to assassinate Hitler at a rally at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Elser’s bomb kills eight people, but Hitler leaves early, foiling the attempt.

1943

LIFE: He is persuaded to move to Moscow by Dmitri Shostakovich, to whom he has sent the score of his First Symphony, written while he is working at the opera house in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

TIMES: Two Soldiers, a film directed by Leonid Lukov, is shown in Soviet cinemas. Set on the Leningrad front in World War II, it focuses on the friendship between fighters of different ethnicities.

1996

LIFE: He dies in Moscow on 3 January, having been housebound by Crohn’s disease for three years.

His last symphony, No. 22, remains unorchestrated at his death.

TIMES: At the Olympic Games in Atlanta, US, Russian swimmer Alexander Popov wins gold in the men’s 50m and 100m freestyle, defending his 1992 titles.