Weinberg: String Quartets Nos. 8-10

Album review

One could listen to the quartets on this album like the diaries of a life’s experiences. Wajnberg’s music was first presented in Poland as late as 1963, during the Warsaw Autumn, when the Komitas Quartet played his String Quartet No. 8 which was met with polite indifference. It was not the kind of music that the Warsaw Autumn audience craved for in the heyday of the avant-garde. Wajnberg composed in traditional melodic motifs, simple rhythms and tonal harmonies, at most slightly tinged with dissonances. The message contained in his highly personal oeuvre becomes more clear when we learn more about the dramatic circumstances of his life. He was born in 1919 in Warsaw. In September 1939 he escaped from Warsaw to the Soviet Union. His poor health protected him from being enrolled in the army, so he could continue his music studies. After his diploma in 1941, he found himself on the run again. He spent the next two years in Tashkent as a répétiteur. Thanks to the intervention of Shostakovich, Wajnberg was allowed to move back to Moscow, where he was to spend the rest of his life. He visited Warsaw only once more in 1966. By that time, he was well known in the Soviet Union but in Poland no-one remembered him.

After two years of relatively peaceful life in Moscow, there came five dramatic years. In 1948 his wife’s father, the famous actor Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders, and from that moment on the family lived under constant police supervision. Wajnberg was criticised for formalism and the pessimistic character of his works, which – according to the Composers’ Union – suggested that he did not properly appreciate the excellent conditions of his life. In 1953 he was imprisoned on the charge of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism”, but Stalin’s death – and Shostakovitch’s help again – saved him from certain death. Once released however, he would never feel safe, and till his last days he lived in constant fear. He was extremely cautious in conversations, and contained his emotions in his music, the atmosphere of which – including his String Quartets Nos. 8 , 9 and 10, respectively 1959, 1963 and 1964 – comes from the mind of someone who suffered a tragic fate. No wonder that all the quartets on this album are composed in minor keys, while the slow movements are the longest and the most momentous. Wajnberg’s music can be summed up with a comment that he made in 1988: “Many of my works are associated with the war. But this topic was not my own choice. It was determined by the tragic fate of those dearest and closest to me. I consider it my moral duty to write about the war and about the terrible fate that our age has prepared for so many.” © SM/Qobuz