Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor, dies at 80
By Allan Kozinn

Friday, April 27, 2007 Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned, not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died Friday in Moscow, a spokeswoman for Russia’s state culture agency said.

He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland.

Russian news agencies said he had died in a Moscow hospital after a long illness.

As a cellist, Rostropovich played a vast repertory that included works written for him by some of the greatest composers of the 20th century, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten.

He also played the premieres of solo works by Walton, Auric, Kabalevsky and Misaskovsky, and concertos by Lutoslawski, Panufnik, Messiaen, Schnittke, Henri Dutilleux, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Lukas Foss and Giya Kancheli.

Perhaps because his repertory was so broad, he was able to make his cello sing in an extraordinary range of musical accents. In the big Romantic showpieces - the Dvorak, Schumann, Saint-Saëns and Elgar concertos, for example - he dazzled listeners with both his richly personalized interpretations and a majestic warmth of tone. His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their spirituality. He could be a firebrand in contemporary works and he seemed to enjoy producing the unusual timbres that modernist composers often demanded.

As a conductor, Rostropovich was an individualist. He happily molded tempos, phrase shapes and instrumental balances to suit an interpretive vision that was distinctly his own, and if his work did suit all tastes, it was widely agreed that the passion he brought to the podium yielded performances that were often as compelling as they were unconventional. He was at his most eloquent - and also his most freewheeling - in Russian music, particularly in the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Rostropovich was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington, from 1977 to 1994, and retained close ties with the orchestra as its conductor laureate. But he maintained strong relationships with several of the world’s great orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Last year, Rostropovich announced that he would stop playing the cello publicly, but his conducting remained as vigorous as ever, and his schedule included commemorations of the Shostakovich centenary in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Moscow and Tokyo.

”He was the most important man in my life, after my father,” Rostropovich said of Shostakovich in a New York Times interview last year. ”Sometimes when I’m conducting, I see his face coming to me. Sometimes it’s not really a happy face - I conduct maybe a bit too slow, so I conduct faster, and the face disappears.”

He always said that one of the principal lures of the podium was that the orchestral repertory seemed so vast when compared with the cello repertory.

He commissioned regularly and led the premieres of more than 50 works. Two of the pieces written for him during his National Symphony years - Stephen Albert’s ”Riverrun” Symphony and Morton Gould’s ”Stringmusic” - won Pulitzer Prizes.

”The passing of Mstislav Rostropovich is a bitter blow to our culture,” the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said Friday, according to his wife, Natalya, The Associated Press reported. ”He gave Russian culture worldwide fame. Farewell, beloved friend.”

Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Druckman, Richard Wernick, Gunther Schuller and Ezra Laderman were among the other composers who wrote for him, or whose works had their world premieres under his baton.

Tall, heavyset and bald but for a halo of white hair, Rostropovich was a commanding presence, both on and off the stage. But he was also gregarious in an extroverted, Russian way: At the end of an orchestral performance, he often hopped off the podium and kissed and hugged every musician within reach.

Rostropovich, who was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian), was also an accomplished pianist. He was often the accompanist at recitals by his wife, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, whom he married in 1955, and who survives him, as do two daughters, Olga and Elena.

But he became famous well beyond musical circles, as a symbol of artistic conscience and his defiance of the Soviet regime. When Solzhenitsyn came increasingly under attack by the Soviet authorities in the late 1960s, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya allowed him to stay in their dacha outside Moscow. He was their guest for four years, and Rostropovich tried to intercede on his behalf. His own troubles began in 1970 when, out of frustration with the suppression of Solzhenitsyn and other writers, artists and musicians, he sent an open letter of protest to Pravda, which did not publish it, and Western newspapers, which did.

”Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word,” he asked in the letter. ”Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.”

After publication of the letter, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya found themselves unable to travel abroad, and facing dwindling engagements at home. Occasionally, it would seem that the ban was lifted. In 1971, Rostropovich conducted and Vishnevskaya sang in Bolshoi Opera performances in Vienna, and Rostropovich was allowed to travel to the United States for concerts. But the next year, scheduled appearances in Austria and Britain were canceled without explanation.

It was not until 1974 that they were allowed out of the country again. In the West, Rostropovich continued to be outspoken, telling interviewers that he missed Russia and longed to return, but that he would not do so until artists were free to speak their minds.

”I will not utter one single lie in order to return,” he said in 1977, ”And once there, if I see new injustice, I will speak out four times more loudly than before.”

The Soviet government’s response was to revoke his and Vishnevskaya’s citizenship in 1978. Thereafter they traveled on special Swiss documents.

But they outlived the Soviet system. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of increased openness, Rostropovich began to renew his contacts with his homeland. He met with Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1987, and in 1989, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rostropovich gave an impromptu concert there.

In 1990, Rostropovich’s Soviet citizenship was restored. The following month, he took the National Symphony to Moscow and what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

In 1991, when Communist hard-liners tried to topple the more open regime, Rostropovich went to Moscow to stand beside Boris Yeltsin. And two years later, during the siege of the Russian White House, Rostropovich gave a free concert in Red Square.

Originally planned merely as a gesture to music lovers who were unable to attend the formal indoor concerts, the performance was transformed into a show of support for democratization.

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, on March 27, 1927.

His parents, Leopold Rostropovich and Sofiya Nikolaevna Fedotov, were both musicians, and his mother began teaching him the piano when he was 4. When he was 8, he began to study the cello with his father. In the mid-1930s, the family moved to Moscow, where Rostropovich entered the Gnesin Institute. He made his debut at 13, playing a Saint-Saëns Concerto, and in 1943 he entered the Moscow Conservatory.

By the late 1940s, Rostropovich had won competitions in Moscow and, in his first trips outside the Soviet Union, in Prague and Budapest. He toured widely during the 1950s, and in 1956, he made his U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall.

Rostropovich made his conducting debut in 1968, when he led a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ”Eugene Onegin” at the Bolshoi.

In 1977, Rostropovich accepted the directorship of the National Symphony Orchestra. For one of his first concerts, Leonard Bernstein wrote ”Slava!” - a festive overture that captured the ebullience of Rostropovich’s style.

Although conducting seemed to be his principal interest from the late 1970s on, he continued to pursue an active recital and concerto career as a cellist.

His instrument was the 1711 ”Duport” Stradivarius.

He also continued to make superb recordings, making his way through the great cello works several times. Yet it was not until 1991, when he was 63, that he decided to record all six of the Bach Suites, a set he considered the crowning glory of the instrument’s literature.

He chose the site, the Basilique Sainte-Madeleine, in Váezelay, France, because he considered the church’s acoustics perfect. He produced and edited the recordings himself, and paid for the sessions so that if he were dissatisfied, he would be free to destroy the tapes.