Prompted by my recent readings of Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West, I returned earlier this evening to his opera, The Passenger. Amidst the digital piles in one of my hard drives, there was a recording of the opera conducted by Mirga Gražintė-Tyla, issued last year by Deutsche Grammophon, that suddenly came to my recollection. (I had downloaded it, but somehow never got around to hearing it.)
As with all great operas, there are multiple layers of expression and meaning in Weinberg’s The Passenger, some intended, some not. Aside from its central theme, the traumas of the Holocaust, Weinberg’s opera also seemed to grapple with some of the frictive consequences of globalization. Not for nothing did the 20th century spawn two world wars (and a third if we count the First Cold War). Technology in the last century brought us closer together, occasionally uncomfortably so: distance sometimes really does make the heart grow fonder. Various languages overlap and sometimes interrupt each other throughout The Passenger; they reinforce not only the cultural, ideological, and national conflicts that produced the atrocities around which the opera is based, but imply still unknown, future horrors to come. It’s not so much that “we’re all in this together”, to borrow a pandemic-era mass media slogan, as it is every man for himself.
So what a surprise to be reminded that the interlingual discord in The Passenger was neither the making of Weinberg nor his librettist, Alexander Medvedev — this opera was meant to be sung in Russian. This wasn’t clear in Deutsche Grammophon’s recording; a digital-only release, it confoundingly does not include a libretto, liner notes, or even a track list. (My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t remember whether or not this subject is addressed in the booklet for Roland Kluttig’s recording.) A few key strokes on my computer eventually led me to learn that the multilingual version of the libretto was an adaptation for the 2010 performance in Bregenz.
Earlier this week, my copy of the latest issue of the DSCH Journal arrived in the mail. One of its recurring topics was the collateral damage the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has inflicted on international research into Shostakovich and 20th-century Soviet Russian music in general. Weinberg, who inhabits an even more delicate nodal point in this yawning civilizational fault line, is also one of its casualties, which is intimated in some recent trends I’ve noticed.
One of them is a noticeable attempt from some quarters to de-Russify Weinberg and his music, or to at least put some air between him and his now problematic adopted country.
David Fanning and Michelle Assay, in their foreword to the aforementioned Weinberg book, point out that the 2010 adaptation the libretto for The Passenger cut most mentions of Russian prisoners at Auschwitz “on the tenuous grounds that they reflect the pressures of Soviet cultural mores on the composer and his librettist”. (Restoration of these passages is unlikely post-2022.)
A few years before the war, Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, described Weinberg as “Polish-Jewish”, only mentioning the Soviet Union in passing as an impediment to the “full expression of his identity”, and bypassing any mention of Russia altogether. Another essay, on the Atlanta Symphony’s website, the third hit in a search for the composer, comes to an interesting conclusion:
By all accounts Weinberg was a modest and generous man, somewhat removed from the Soviet mainstream – he never joined the Communist Party — and with his heavily accented Russian destined to remain, at least in part, an émigré. Shortly before his death in 1996, dispirited by Russia's disregard for him and weakened by a long battle with Crohn's disease, Weinberg converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
I’m not sure about his party affiliation. Rostropovich insinuated otherwise in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, labeling Weinberg a party “insider”. (I’ll mention as an aside that his friend and colleague, Georgy Sviridov, who in Western academic discourse is often dismissed as a party hack or a third-rate oddity, was in actuality never a member of the CPSU and was, at least in private, skeptical of its ideals.)
So if Weinberg was dispirited by how Russia treated him, then why would he convert to its church? And if the Soviet Union inhibited Weinberg personally and professionally, why did it promote his music, at least domestically? Why did he, in turn, compose quite a few works in praise of his adopted homeland, even as late as the glasnost period, not all of which appear to have been in response to official requests?
Alexander Tchaikovsky has noted that Weinberg was a lifelong “patriot” and believer in the Soviet way of life; this is confirmed in his mid-1990s interview with Manashir Yakubov. Weinberg, as it turns out, was not only a genuine Soviet artist — his second homeland was officially multi-ethnic — but also to an extent a post-national one. Polish by birth, Jewish by heritage, Russian by choice, his personal convictions and fluid trans-national identity discomfit those who prefer art that knows its place as easily commodified fodder for propaganda. “Poland is my homeland”, Weinberg once said, “but my second homeland remains Russia”. Caught between fences and international grudge matches in which he had no say, he is a man as much of our time as he was of his.