Has the Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Time Finally Come?

It’s difficult to define a comeback in classical music. A neglected composer may be championed by the artists of one generation only to be ignored by the next, or resurface during an anniversary only to return underground.

Take the works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96), a Polish-born composer who found refuge in Soviet Russia, but whose reputation in the West is largely overshadowed by that of his good friend Dmitri Shostakovich. There has been increasing interest in Weinberg this century, and there are signs that his music is finally taking root in the repertoire.

The latest milestone is an excellent revival of his opera “The Idiot” at the high-profile Salzburg Festival in Austria under the baton of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a conductor with a Deutsche Grammophon contract who has, with scholarly authority, brought Weinberg’s works to something like the mainstream.

Still, as a figure in music history he remains mostly unknown to modern listeners: a Jewish composer who wrote with unwavering beauty and peace in the face of some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities; whose identity and experiences suffused more than 150 works, as well as dozens of soundtracks that await attention and interpretation; who, under no outside pressure, according to his family, converted to Christianity at the end of his life.

Weinberg was born in Warsaw but fled in 1939, after hearing on the radio that a German invasion of the city was imminent. (He traveled alone; it wasn’t until the 1960s that he learned his family had been murdered in a concentration camp.) He went to the Soviet border, and settled in Minsk. Nearly two years later, he left there as the Nazis pushed eastward, joining the wartime refugee community in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

He ultimately made it to Moscow, with the help of composers including Shostakovich, who had secured an invitation for Weinberg from the State Committee on the Arts. He enjoyed some modest prosperity and rising prominence, but a Stalinist crackdown on music, combined with institutionalized antisemitism, led to his arrest in early 1953.