Date of composition: 1964
Premiere: of the ballet on 10 June 1962 in Moscow
Duration: 17 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
16.04.2026
Mieczysław or Móisei? Weinberg spelled with a W or V, with ei or ay? There are numerous variations of this Soviet composer’s Polish-Jewish name – something that has hardly helped make it recognizable. For decades, no one looked for him at all, neither in Russia nor in the West. If his name did appear somewhere, he was mentioned as a kind of “B‑Shostakovich”, an epigonal pupil of his older colleague. That such a description was completely off the mark only began to dawn on the musical world in 2010 – when David Pountney, then artistic director of the Bregenz Festival, gave The Passenger its staged world premiere. Forty‑two years after its creation, Weinberg’s opera about the encounter between a former concentration-camp guard and one of her victims caused an enormous press reaction. It became a posthumous catalyst for rediscovering a composer whose output includes 17 string quartets, 22 symphonies, six solo concertos, 28 sonatas, seven operas, over 200 songs, and around 70 works for film, theatre, and circus.
Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919 as the son of a violinist. When Hitler invaded Poland, the 19‑year‑old piano student fled alone to Belarus; all the family members who remained behind were murdered by the National Socialists. Two years later – by then Weinberg had been studying composition in Minsk – the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German Wehrmacht forced him to flee a second time. This time he travelled 4,000 kilometres by train to Uzbekistan. After the German capitulation at Stalingrad, he was able to settle in Moscow in 1943 – supported by Dmitri Shostakovich, to whom he had sent the score of his First Symphony. Until Shostakovich’s death, the two composers were closely linked in friendship and artistic exchange. As their works did not conform to the ideological requirements of socialist realism, both became targets of the infamous anti-formalism campaign launched by the Soviet regime in 1948.
The jingoism demanded by the regime is indeed nowhere to be found in Weinberg’s oeuvre. A large part of his work reflects the human catastrophes of the 20th century brought about by war and the Holocaust. Yet despite the loss of home and family, and despite his precarious existence inside a totalitarian surveillance state, Weinberg repeatedly found consoling moments in his music. Aside from his delightful music for the Russian children’s television series Winnie Pooh, he also created a whole series of humorous, musical, even genuinely funny works.
One such work is the ballet The Golden Key, with – in the words of conductor Mirga Gražinytė‑Tyla – its “incredibly colourful, cheerful and fantastically orchestrated music”. It is based on the folk tale Buratino by Aleksey Tolstoy, whose father was a distant relative of the famous Lev Tolstoy. That story is in turn a variation on Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio: after many turbulent adventures, the puppet figure Buratino succeeds, with the help of his friend Pierrot, the dog Artemon, and the fairy Malvina, in obtaining the golden key and freeing himself from the tyranny of the theatre director Karabas Barabas. In doing so, they show a certain kinship with the figures of the commedia dell’arte and at times recall Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka.