A question of a sense of humour? The bittersweet taste of Mieczysław Wajnberg’s Old Letters Op. 77

From the beginning of his composing activity until the 1960s, Mieczysław Weinberg reached for texts by Julian Tuwim. He admired his poetic artistry, and often read the content of Tuwim’s poems through the prism of his own experiences. Song cycle Old Letters Op. 77 is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful not only in the artistic output of Wajnberg himself, but also in the vocal literature of the 20th century. Sublime connections between music and text, which certainly testify to the author’s sensitivity, also seem to betray Weinberg’s sarcasm and the so-called “black sense of humor”. In Opus 77, Wajnberg repeatedly winks at the listener: an attentive, musically prepared listener is able to pick up many of the composer’s allusions in the form of harmonic nuances that change the semantic context of the song’s content. Verena Mogl, a researcher of Weinberg’s life and work, claims that such measures may constitute a kind of “commentary on Western European society, an overtone of Soviet reality.” The author of the article presents the bittersweet taste of Old Letters on selected examples, thus presenting her own proposal for reading individual songs based on her in-depth analyzes. The article was supplemented with an appendix containing all Tuwim’s texts used by Weinberg in Opus 77.