Mieczyslaw Weinberg 1919 – 1996

For many decades this beautiful adagio from the musical opus ‘the passenger’ languished in obscurity. Stalin considered it subversive because in his very words ‘beauty can at times be so terrifying.’ Beria the head of internal affairs issued a decree to burn every trace of it in the name of the Great Patriotic cause…because he took special exception to Weinberg christening his adagio, 600 miles. This was the distance the 19 year old Weinberg walked from Warsaw to Minsk, Belarus to escape the Nazi’s who killed his entire family. Even the Europeans didnt want to play it. They were just plain jealous and so they just ignored it (that’s the way of crooks) but the real reason was because they couldn’t come to terms with the idea that the Bolsheviks could produce something so hauntingly beautiful. The Americans were falling over themselves as the pernicious hold of Mc Carthyism was in full force and any Musician, even one such as myself who had a broken violin would be considered a communist just for humming the mere tune…..it was crushed by the weight of time.

I first came across this in July 1997 as a second year Master of Science student specialising in gas turbines in Rolls Royce Industrial turbines in Derby. After five I worked as a janitor and cleaner in the Everyman arts and cultural center to supplement my meager student income. That fateful evening while tidying up and setting strsight the modest provincial theatre…usually I would just sweep up acres of KFC carcasses, but that night there were some loose score sheets strewn on the podium..and there I played them in my head for the very first time. Thats one of the advantages of being autistic. I can play it all in my head with Dobly and THX sorround sound.

Gilgamesh wrote in the ‘heroes journey’ about the spirit arrow, he termed it the Hark-mar-thier, that which can pierce the deepest core of a man’s heart leaving him raptured and decrepit with a longing for an indescrible unfulfilled yearning that will haunt him forever….that night, the mythical arrowhead forged from a meteorite (you want proof that alien mind control technology was used on earth once upon a time…..here it is!) pierced my soul as I played the score in my head…….. Only the Portguese have a word to describe this state of dissonance, its called ‘Saudade’. Once you have been saudaded consider yourself mind fucked 360 degrees 24/7…..because that delectable unknown quantity is just not going to leave you be…. It will stick in your head like chewing gum forever…I heard it everywhere I went…in the rustling of dried leafs, in the wind in the meadows, on my solitary night walks, in the whine of the turbines I proofed daily……you see it is really quite simple. I have never heard anything so beautiful in my life before…its sheer subtely, its sublimely clever sophistication masquerading as ordinariness, yet approachable beneath it all an indescrible hemispheric depth and nuance that mirrored my own alienarionation from the world. This is where I must end my personal recount as some things as I much prefer to keep secret and take to my grave as a man of solitude.

Remember the first eight minutes is the one that will transport you to the world of the floating dreams…..your life will never be the same again.