Jaromir Weinberger

The life of Jaromír Weinberger reflects the extraordinary promise of a musical prodigy, as well as the devastating upheaval experienced by Jewish artists in Europe in the 1930s. Celebrated in his youth as the 'new Mozart', Weinberger rose to international fame with his opera Schwanda the Bagpiper, becoming one of Europe’s most successful composers. However, the rise of Nazism profoundly disrupted his career and personal life, forcing him to flee to several different countries and continents, and leaving him struggling to find his place in a changing musical world. His story is one of remarkable achievement, displacement, and loss — and of a composer whose work is only now being rediscovered.

Weinberger was born into an assimilated Jewish family in the Vinohrady district on 8 January 1896. The Weinbergers had farmed the land for generations, but Jaromír’s father moved to Prague and set up a furniture shop.

Weinberger was a child prodigy, known as 'the new Mozart'. He started playing the piano at the age of five, before branching into composing and conducting at around the age of ten. One of his early composition teachers was Rudolf Karel. Weinberger was highly regarded and was often presented as a poster child for the region.

He received two degrees from the Prague Conservatory: one in composition and the other in piano. After graduating, he tried to earn a living as a composer. However, the economy was unstable after the First World War, and he was competing against established icons such as Leoš Janáček. Consequently, Weinberger moved to Leipzig to study composition with Max Reger. Unfortunately, Reger died less than a year later, so Weinberger returned to Prague, where he started writing whatever he could to earn money, including cabaret songs for the Red Seven (Červená sedma), an avant-garde cabaret in Prague that operated out of the Rokoko Theatre building on Wenceslas Square during the interwar period.

Although an intelligent, self-educated man who spoke several languages, Weinberger was often a loner. In 1922, Weinberger accepted a job teaching composition at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Although he wrote some pieces based on American poems and novels, he was not happy living in such cultural isolation and, in 1926, he returned to Prague.

Weinberger received his big break in 1927 with his opera Švanda dudák (Schwanda the Bagpiper). The opera was not particularly well-received in Prague, but someone from Universal Edition attended a performance and telegrammed his colleagues to immediately come see a performance. They recognized the brilliance of the work, but knew it needed to be translated into German to be popular. After the opera was performed with Max Brod’s translation and Weinberger’s edits, it became an international sensation. Translated into 17 languages, Schwanda had over 2000 performances within a few years, finally making Weinberger financially stable. The “Polka and Fugue” from this opera is still performed by bands and orchestras today.

In 1933, Weinberger wrote his operetta (Na růžích ustláno) A Bed of Roses which was later adapted into the score for a Czechoslovakian talking film. When Hitler became Chancellor that same year, Weinberger was one of the most successful composers in Europe and Hitler could not stand the idea that not only a Jewish composer, but a foreign Jewish composer was more popular than the Aryan standards of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Hitler and the Reichsmusikkammer sought to find and kill Weinberger and destroy everything of his that they could. Performances of his works were cancelled and banned, scores were destroyed and the government seized possession of his assets.

As the Nazis invaded the Sudetenland and then moved into Prague and other areas of Europe, Weinberger and his wife moved to Paris, then London (where he wrote incidental music for the BBC, as well as commercial jingles to earn some money), and then fled to the United States by way of Canada. In between his European moves, he returned to Prague as often as he could, always remaining in hiding from the Nazis. After a few years in upstate New York, he and his wife ultimately settled in Florida.

His mother and one of his sisters were murdered in Terezín and when Weinberger learned this news, he became severely depressed, often suffering from mental breakdowns. In addition, he had no income to speak of. He tried to go to Hollywood, but many Jews had already emigrated there. He also felt that he had been left behind by the new wave of composers. He was still writing in a traditional Czech folksong style and there didn’t seem to be a place for him among American composers. Weinberger tried his hand at photography; he tried self-publishing his compositions, but he remained poor and depressed. Prague was now under Soviet control and he was not welcome there, so he remained in the United States. He never regained his earlier popularity and died from suicide on August 8, 1967.

The primary historian and biographer of Jaromír Weinberger is Tristan Willems, a conductor, composer and publisher who splits his time between Prague and Iceland. Willems discovered most of the existing Weinberger scores in the archives of the Czech Musical Instrument Museum where they had been sealed with SS tape. He also found letters and telegrams outlining many of these works and he has dedicated much of his life to editing, publishing and recording the compositions of Jaromír Weinberger.

In 1940, Jaromír Weinberger was commissioned by Cecil Leeson to write a saxophone concerto. This is the first movement of the premiere recording by Christopher Creviston and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tristan Willems.

Hannah Creviston, 2026.

Sources

Willems, Tristan. “Lecture on Jaromír Weinberger.” Guest video lecture for ASU MUS 394 Music and the Holocaust.

Willems, Tristan. “Weinberger Rediscovered”. Toccata Classics. https://toccataclassics.com/jaromir-weinberger-rediscovered.