Renowned cellist, dissident Rostropovich dies

Ever the bon vivant with a big smile and twinkling blue eyes, he had a reputation for his love of women and drink.

“He is a passionate man and he has a real lust for life, and his marriage is stronger because of it,” his daughter Olga said when asked by the Internet Cello Society in 2003 about his love for the five Fs — “fiddles, food, females, friends and fodka.”

“What they have together is very precious and nothing can destroy it,” she said.

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan. His mother was a pianist. His grandfather and father were cellists. One memorable photo shows him as an infant cradled in his father’s cello case. He started playing the piano at age 4 and took up the cello at about 7, later studying at the Moscow Conservatory.

Suffering essential for art, cellist said
“When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice — my voice,” Rostropovich told Strad magazine.

He made his public debut as a cellist in 1942 at age 15, and gained wide notice in the West nine years later, when the Soviets sent him to perform at a festival in Florence, Italy. Life magazine reported the 24-year-old “stirred the audience to warm applause.” A New York Times critic said, “His tone was big, clean and accurate. ... His musical style seemed to be ardent and intense.”

He developed close musical relationships with contemporary composers, from Shostakovich to Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten.

During the 2002 AP interview, he spoke about Shostakovich, who endured part of the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad and battled for individual expression under Stalin.

Suffering is essential for art, Rostropovich said. “You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life. If he (is) only happy with his life, I think that he (does not fully) understand what is happiness.”

Knighthood and a presidential medal
Rostropovich’s work for humanity didn’t stop with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he and his wife established the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation to help to improve health care for children in former Soviet lands.

Rostropovich received numerous awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 and a knighthood conferred on him that year by Queen Elizabeth II on his 60th birthday.

On the cellist’s 80th birthday, the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published a letter the reclusive Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1973 after the author and his wife moved out of the Rostropoviches’ house.

“Once more I repeat to you and Galiya my delight at your steadfastness, with which you endured all the oppression connected with me and did not allow me to feel,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “Once again I am grateful for the years of shelter with you, where I survived a time that was very stormy for me, but thanks to the exceptional circumstances I all the same wrote without interruption.”

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1955, survivors include their daughters Olga and Elena.