When Mieczyslaw Weinberg staged his new two-act opera Masel tov – in German, Wir Gratulieren! – in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s he was still facing anti-Semitism after a lifetime of disruption and oppression. He had the extreme bad fortune to have lived under two totalitarian regimes. As a Polish Jew in Warsaw he was forced to flee the Nazi invasion, ending up in Stalin’s Russia. His parents and sisters were left behind and perished in a concentration camp.

Album artwork

In Moscow, like all Soviet artists, he had to walk the creative tightrope, faring better than his friend Shostakovich. Even 20 years after Stalin’s death he was watchful when he...