Although Weinberg's music was praised by critics and colleagues—including Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers—and continued to be played, he was surveilled and harassed by the MVD.

He experienced his greatest professional success in the 1960s, when his music was played by musicians such as Rudolf Barshai, the Borodin Quartet, Timofei Dokschitzer, Mikhail Fichtenholz, Leonid Kogan, Kirill Kondrashin, and Mstislav Rostropovich, among others.

In the mid-1960s, Weinberg began an extramarital affair with Olga Rakhalskaya, daughter of the psychiatrist Yuliy Rakhalsky [ru], that quickly developed into a romantic relationship; they married in 1972.

[1] During his career in the Yiddish theater of interwar Warsaw, he was known by the German spelling of his name, Mosze Weinberg; a typical convention of the time for Polish musicians who aspired to produce recordings for export.

[14] He had originally come from Kishinev, Bessarabia Governorate (today part of Moldova), which he left shortly before its Jewish community was attacked in the pogrom of 1903, in the course of which Weinberg's grandparents and great-grandparents were killed.

[22] Weinberg made his professional debut in a chamber concert organized by the Polish Society for Contemporary Music on December 10, 1936, wherein he was the pianist for the world premiere of Andrzej Panufnik's Piano Trio.

Weinberg's marriage into the family of Mikhoels, who was then at the peak of his career as leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, significantly improved the composer's social and financial standing.

It was only through a meeting with the trumpeter Eddie Rosner, a fellow Polish immigrant who was touring Tashkent and had also played at the Café Adria before the war, that he learned his family had been deported from Warsaw by train to an unknown destination.

[56] Weinberg's newfound comfort, which contrasted sharply with his financial and professional standing in prewar Poland,[57] also coincided with a gradual return to normalcy in everyday Soviet life.

Andrei Zhdanov led campaigns against formalism in the fields of literature and film in 1946; this resulted in the censure of Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Sergei Eisenstein.

[65] On January 5, 1948, Joseph Stalin and members of the Politburo attended the Bolshoi Theatre for a performance of the opera The Great Friendship by the Georgian composer Vano Muradeli.

The writer Mikhail Veller, who saw the film in his childhood, recalled it and its music:[87] It [sent] chills down my spine, needles pricking me in the chest and knees, a spasm in my throat, tears in my eyes, hope, grim delight, and joy.

[92] A 1955 ballet, The Golden Key, based on the eponymous children's tale by Alexei Tolstoy that was itself adapted from Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, became Weinberg's major work of the era.

[85] The work had originated from music Weinberg had composed for a "vaudeville for children" by the writer Vadim Korostolyov [ru]; its success led to the commissioning of The Golden Key.

[96] Increased royalties from performances of his concert music in combination with steady film work, which was the most profitable available to Soviet composers, provided Weinberg with the freedom to earn a comfortable living from composition alone.

[99][100] According to the musicologist Lyudmila Nikitina, who had first met the composer in the early 1960s, the symphony crystallized procedures that Weinberg would continue to use throughout his life; wherein he drew from personal experience, treated the act of creation as a "mirror of his individual perception", and produced music of social significance.

Weinberg's feelings of unease on this trip were reinforced by the snubbing he received from most Polish composers; an outcome that was based on their perceptions of him as a stylistic reactionary and a member of the Soviet establishment, as well as their general suspicion of Russian culture.

[124]Much of Weinberg's time during these years was spent in his unsuccessful attempts to stage his opera The Passenger,[125] based on the 1962 eponymous novel by Zofia Posmysz, which in turn she had adapted from her original radio play.

Although he noted that Weinberg's speech was impeded by severe breathing problems and that he looked "very thin, very faint, like a shadow", Altskan said his face retained a youthful countenance.

[154]Gwizdalanka said that although Weinberg may not have been aware that anti-Semitism in the Orthodox Church exceeded that in Western Christianity, the message of death as freedom and the promise of eternity in Brodsky's poem had been decisive in his conversion.

[153] After a small funeral service presided by Alexander Medvedev, the librettist of The Passenger, and Valentin Berlinsky, Weinberg was buried on March 1, 1996 at Domodedovo Cemetery [ru].

He was paranoid of continued anti-Semitic persecution, extremely fearful of being unpunctual, and greatly worried that his connections with people outside of the Soviet Union would draw official scrutiny.

[157] When Weinberg's former classmate, Małcużyński, requested to visit with him during a tour of the Soviet Union, the composer sought repeated reassurances from authorities that it was acceptable to meet with the pianist and invite him home.

[160] In general, Viktoria described Weinberg as being an unworldly person with a childish sense of helplessness at dealing with the world beyond music and that he constantly depended on the aid of family and friends.

[167] Weinberg's work catalog consists of over 150 compositions designated with opus numbers, in addition to various incidental scores for feature films, cartoons, theatre, and the circus.

[97] Along with longstanding friends like Kogan, who premiered the Violin Concerto, a new generation of musicians—including Rudolf Barshai, Timofei Dokschitzer, Mikhail Fichtenholz, Kirill Kondrashin, and Mstislav Rostropovich—incorporated his music into their repertoire.

His opera, The Passenger, while taking the Holocaust as its main subject, depicts prisoners from a wide range of nationalities and makes little specific mention of Jewish suffering.

[192] Weinberg's music was generally received positively in his early years in the Soviet Union, but it faced insinuations about its perceived derivativeness and dependence on wartime imagery.

[200] A work that the musicologist Lyudmila Nikitina said is structured "akin to a dramatic monologue",[201] it is the first of his six vocal symphonies,[202] and consists of settings of texts by Leib Kvitko, Samuil Galkin, and Mikhail Lukonin; all of whom were considered to be politically suspect by authorities.

According to Alexander Tchaikovsky, Weinberg's rapid marginalization from the mainstream of Soviet music in the 1980s was the by-product of increased interest in avant-gardists of the time such as Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edison Denisov[206] that had occurred because of glasnost and perestroika.