The unstoppable master of intimated emotion

Smiling Larry says:

No, the Moldavian Rhapsody was not commissioned.

As to its intrinsic worth, it was premiered and then frequently played as an encore by David Oistrakh, whose taste in music is presumably to be taken seriously.

Further, it is ridiculous to imagine any composer “stealing” from a popular work like the Enesco Rhapsody and actually expecting to get away with it. On those grounds, it could be said that Enesco in turn “stole” from the rhapsodies of Liszt … who, like Bartok, Brahms and Haydn and countless others, “stole” from now-anonymous Hungarian musicians.

Finally, it is beyond ridiculous to assert that Weinberg did not know the folklore of his own Moldavian parents. Here is Peter Laki on the subject (from notes on a performance of the orchestra-only version):

“The Soviet Communist Party always urged composers to use melodies from the country’s various ethnic traditions. It was natural for Weinberg to turn to Moldavia, his parents’ birthplace, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the year after Weinberg’s flight from Poland. (The region had been part of the Russian Empire before the revolution, although most of it belonged to the Kingdom of Romania during the interwar years). Obeying political directives was more vital than ever in 1949, one year after an infamous Party resolution had not only harshly denounced but physically threatened the country’s most famous composers. Weinberg, only 29 at the time, was too young to be singled out for censure, but he was implicitly included in the ranks of the condemned “formalists.” And in his case, the general calamity had been compounded by an even more disastrous event involving his immediate family: in January 1948 his father-in-law, the famous Yiddish actor Solomon Michoels, was murdered in Minsk on direct orders from Stalin. It was under such historical circumstances that the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes was written. The Rhapsody strings together a number of folk songs from Moldavia, a country that is culturally and linguistically very close to Romania. Most of the melodies Weinberg used belong to the majority population, but the fiery final section is an unmistakable Jewish klezmer dance tune. According to a 1903 statistic, the inhabitants of Moldavia’s capital, Chișinău (Kishinev), were almost 50% Jewish. That year, a devastating pogrom took place in the town, with 49 dead and 1,500 homes damaged. It is hard to imagine that Weinberg should not have thought of that tragedy, at least secretly, when he composed this brilliantly orchestrated work that contributed significantly to his growing reputation in Moscow.”