Renowned cellist, dissident Rostropovich dies

updated 5:04 p.m. ET April 27, 2007

MOSCOW - Mstislav Rostropovich, the ebullient master cellist who fought for the rights of Soviet-era dissidents and later triumphantly played Bach suites below the crumbling Berlin Wall, died Friday. He was 80.

Rostropovich died in a Moscow cancer hospital, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. Rostropovich’s spokeswoman, Natalia Dollezhal, confirmed to The Associated Press that he had died but she did not provide other details.

‘He gave Russian culture worldwide fame’
Rostropovich, who resided in Paris after self-imposed exile, suffered from intestinal cancer.

“The passing of Mstislav Rostropovich is a bitter blow to our culture,” said the author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sheltered by Rostropovich during the writer’s bitter fight against Soviet authorities in the 1970s.

“He gave Russian culture worldwide fame. Farewell, beloved friend,” Solzhenitsyn said, according to ITAR-Tass.

The musician’s death follows that of another towering Russian — former President Boris Yeltsin, who led the country from communism to democracy.

Rostropovich was hospitalized in Paris in early February, and after he took a turn for the worse, his family arranged for him to return to Russia, said his longtime manager Ronald Wilford.

Putin visited him in hospital
He was treated at a Moscow hospital, and was visited Feb. 6 by President Vladimir Putin.

Seven weeks later, he was well enough to attend a celebration at the Kremlin on his 80th birthday, but he appeared frail.

“I feel myself the happiest man in the world,” Rostropovich said after slowly rising from his chair during the March 27 celebration. “I will be even more happy if this evening will be pleasant for you.”

Putin then presented him with a medal — the Order of Service to the Fatherland.

A bear of a man who hugged anyone in sight, “Slava” Rostropovich was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world’s greatest cellist. He was an effusive rather than an intimidating maestro, a teacher who nurtured Jacqueline du Pre, among other great cellists.

“He was the most inspiring musician that I have ever known,” said David Finckel, the Emerson String Quartet’s cellist who studied with Rostropovich for nine years. “He had a way to channel his energy through other people, and it was magical.”

Sheltered and defended Solzhenitsyn
The Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation said the cellist’s funeral would be held Sunday in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, followed by burial in Novodevichy Cemetery, where his teachers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, are buried. Yeltsin, a longtime friend of Rostropovich, was accorded the same funeral and burial arrangements.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma released a statement expressing deep sadness at the loss of his fellow musician.

“Cellists, myself included, are enormously grateful to Slava for the way he transformed the cello repertoire, developing new techniques through compositions he commissioned,” Ma said. “He made things that were once thought impossible on the cello possible.”

Rostropovich’s opposition to the Communist leaders of his homeland started with the denunciations of Shostakovich and Prokofiev during the Stalin era.

Under Leonid Brezhnev’s regime, Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, allowed Solzhenitsyn to live in their dacha when Soviet authorities were pressuring the author over his dissident writing.

After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote an open letter to the Soviet media protesting the official vilification of the author.

“Explain to me please, why in our literature and art (that) so often, people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word?” Rostropovich asserted in the letter, which went unpublished.

‘Like a little boy’ after fleeing to Paris
“I know that after my letter there will be undoubtedly an ‘opinion’ about me, but I am not afraid of it. I openly say what I think. Talent, of which we are proud, must not be submitted to the assaults of the past.”

The couple’s fight for cultural freedom resulted in the cancellation of concerts, foreign tours and recording projects. Finally, in 1974, they fled to Paris with their two daughters. Four years later, their Soviet citizenship was revoked.

In the West, “he was like a little boy, laughing, shouting, pinching himself to make sure these really were the streets in Paris,” the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalled in the 1996 book “Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later.”

Still, exile took its toll.

“When Leonid Brezhnev stripped us of our citizenship in 1978, we were obliterated,” Rostropovich recalled in a 1997 interview in Strad magazine. “Russia was in my heart — in my mind. I suffered because I knew that until the day I died, I would never see Russia or my friends again.”

He was unable to attend Shostakovich’s funeral in 1975.

Energetic well into his 70s
But in 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, Rostropovich showed up with his cello and played Bach cello suites amid the rubble. The next year, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and he made a triumphant return to Russia to perform with Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 1977 to 1994.

When hard-line Communists tried to overthrow then-President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Rostropovich rushed back to Moscow without a visa and spent days in the Russian parliament building to join those protesting the coup attempt.

In his early 70s, he still had the energy of a middle-aged man. He recorded the six Bach solo suites for the first time when he was 70. Five years later, he performed 16 concerts in 11 cities in 28 days, logging nearly 10,000 miles.

Asked by the AP during the 2002 tour about his sleep, he replied in his accented English: “Normally ... four hours for me (is) absolutely enough.”

Finckel recalled that after the release of the Bach recordings, Rostropovich celebrated with a feast at a hotel until 2 a.m., then reserved a meeting room for 4 a.m. to practice his cello.