Obituary: Mstislav Rostropovich (original) (raw)

Cello playing in the 20th century was dominated by two outsize personalities. If the first half belonged to Pablo Casals, the second half was bestridden by Mstislav Rostropovich, who has died aged 80. Both were not just superb all-round musicians, but moral forces who stood out against tyranny and injustice.

Rostropovich's birth - in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, which was then part of the Soviet Union - was not wanted, but even in the womb he asserted himself. "My mother understood too late that she was pregnant; she cried all over the house. My parents decided she would have to be aborted because she already had a little child. It was a joint decision. So my mother started to fight against me, but as you see, I won this war." Even his birth was difficult, occurring after 10 months' gestation.

It was a musical dynasty: his sister Veronika was a violinist; his mother Sofia a pianist; his maternal grandmother head of a music school; his paternal grandfather was a cellist, as was his uncle Semyon Kozolupov. His father Leopold (1892-1942) was a well-known cellist and excellent teacher who had studied with Tchaikovsky's friend Aleksandr Wierzbilowicz, and later with Casals. Mstislav, always known as Slava ("glory" in Russian), taught himself the piano when he was four, and soon after that made his first attempts at composition.

He was found to have perfect pitch, and at eight was studying the cello with his father, who continued to be his teacher at the Central Music School in Moscow. Like Casals, he insisted on doing things his way, which in his case meant playing with a low elbow, a technique foisted on him by an appalling fracture when he was 13. In his early teens, the family was evacuated because of the war to the western Russian city of Orenburg, Sofia's birthplace, where Slava gained his first experience of touring with a small group to neighbouring towns.

He had been playing in public since he was eight, and at 13 he made a modest debut with orchestra, in the Saint-Saëns A minor Concerto. In 1942 a concerto he had written was played by his father, who died later that year.

Slava entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1943 to study cello with his uncle Kozolupov, piano with Nikolai Kuvshinnikov, and composition with Vissarion Shebalin. He was also able to join Shostakovich's orchestration class. Three years later he made his debut with the Moscow Philharmonic; and by the time he obtained his PhD in 1948 he was recognised as one of the Soviet Union's most brilliant instrumentalists, almost as proficient on the piano as on the cello. Through remaining faithful to Shostakovich, Miaskovsky and Prokofiev, he gained their friendship; and he spent the summers of 1950-52 living in Prokofiev's dacha. The main fruit of their collaboration was the Sinfonia Concertante, revised in that period.

Rostropovich formed a sonata duo with pianist Sviatoslav Richter and played in a trio with pianist Emil Gilels and violinist Leonid Kogan that was the finest since the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals combination; like that ensemble, it folded because of political differences between the two string players. In 1955 he married the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya - their song recitals, with Rostropovich at the piano, became legendary. The following year, he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and made his New York and London debuts; and in 1959 he visited Britain with the trio, returning regularly from then on to play concertos. He even gave a somewhat exotic interpretation of the Elgar Concerto, but gave it up after a few performances because he did not think he could match his pupil Jacqueline du Pré.

Rostropovich's friendship with Benjamin Britten dated from September 1960, when he introduced to London the concerto Shostakovich had written for him the previous year; five Britten masterpieces for the cello resulted - the Cello Sonata (1961), three solo Suites (1964, 1967 and 1972), and the Cello Symphony, which the two men first gave with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in Moscow in 1964.

Two years later, Shostakovich wrote a second concerto for Rostropovich. It was even finer than the first. Indeed, unlike Casals, Rostropovich was very much associated with new music and inspired or commissioned works by Dutilleux, Kancheli, Khachaturian, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Piston, Schnittke and many others. From 1953, he also taught; among his pupils were Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian, Mischa Maisky, Frans Helmerson and David Geringas. His cellos included a Storioni, the "Visconti" Stradivarius, a Goffriller, new instruments by Peresson and Vatelot, and his favourite in later years, the "Duport" Strad.

Despite his association with dissident forces in the Soviet Union, Rostropovich enjoyed most of the fruits of success and astutely cultivated friends in the highest circles of the Soviet government, including the minister of the interior and members of the KGB. It was therefore unfair of him, to say the least, to single out his colleague Kogan as a collaborator with the regime - the stigma he placed on that great violinist blighted the later years of Kogan's life.

Still, when it came to it Rostropovich was ready to sacrifice everything. The support he and his wife gave Alexander Solzhenitsin in the late 1960s - even sheltering the beleaguered writer in their home - was too much for the authorities, and in the early 1970s the couple were restricted to touring inside the USSR, before being exiled in 1974 and becoming "unpersons". Rostropovich's name was expunged from scores dedicated to him, Vishnevskaya was removed from the official history of the Bolshoi Theatre, and in 1978 they were stripped of their Soviet citizenship.

Far from repining in the West, Rostropovich enjoyed something of a champagne lifestyle, with homes in Britain, Switzerland, France and the US. He attracted some of the highest fees in the music business and no longer had to hand the money to a greedy state. Then the political climate changed, and when Mikhail Gorbachev's transformation of the Soviet bloc led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Rostropovich played Bach cello suites all night at the frontier in sheer joy.

The marriage to Vishnevskaya survived his blatant womanising, and they continued to make music together both on the concert stage and in the recording studio, although her voice inevitably declined. They returned to Russian triumph in February 1990, and 18 months later Rostropovich flew in from Paris to help bolster the reform movement against the attempted coup by communist hardliners. Having taken the precaution of writing a farewell letter to his absent wife, Rostropovich blagged his way through Moscow airport and got to the barricaded White House parliament building.

Boris Yeltsin later wrote that his arrival there, and request for the loan of an assault rifle for a while, played a crucial role in restoring calm. It has been suggested that awareness that he had settled down to playing the cello all night was a major factor in dissuading the troops outside from shelling the White House, after which the uprising crumbled. The musician certainly saw it as "the most serious and difficult moment for my country".

That storm weathered, in December 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved itself. Rostropovich was rewarded with the State Prize, but his relationship with Russia retained an element of prickliness - after a concert for Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday in 1998 which culminated in him kissing the writer, a gesture seen on television, he was accused of taking any opportunity to promote his Russian comeback, and so swore he would never play there again.

Yet the Rostropovich Foundation set up by him and his wife was responsible for vaccinating more than two million Russian children against disease, and by the early years of the new decade he announced that, having now forgiven everyone, he was going to enjoy himself. This eventual reconciliation was reflected shortly before his death in acceptance from President Vladimir Putin of the Order of Merit award, first degree, for Rostropovich's "outstanding contribution to the development of the musical arts worldwide and many years of creative work".

From the late 1960s, the cellist also developed a second career as a conductor - notably with the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington (1977-94), and in Britain as a guest with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. This move did not meet with universal approval, and his success was patchy. His tempi could be turgid and the moments of inspiration did not always make up for the lumpy, graceless balancing of the orchestral textures. His greatest successes on the podium were achieved in the works of his friends Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Schnittke.

Even his cello playing became more eccentric: his interpretation of the Dvorak Concerto degenerated into a string of grotesque mannerisms - although no one who heard it will forget the performance he gave of this Czech masterpiece at a Promenade Concert broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was performed by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov on the evening of the day in August 1968 when his compatriots invaded Czechoslovakia. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he followed the concerto with an unforgettable reading of the Sarabande from Bach's second solo Suite.

At his best, he was an incomparable instrumentalist, as hundreds of recordings attest; any shortlist would include the various Britten, Prokofiev and Shostakovich works, the concertos by Lutoslawski and Dutilleux, the trios with Gilels and Kogan, the Dvorak Concerto with Boult and the Brahms sonatas with Serkin. When he was on form, his gigantic personality carried all before it. His playing, wonderfully secure in tone and technique even in the fastest passages, was in a class of its own. When he stopped performing in public in 2005, the refulgent sound of his cello was much missed.

Rostropovich was artistic to his fingertips. His various dwellings were full of beautiful objects, many of them chosen to remind him of his homeland and its history. In private, he was passionate, extrovert, volatile and voluble. Theatre people speak of being "Trevved" by Trevor Nunn, who famously enfolds friends in massive embraces. Musical folk found the experience of being "Slava'd" even more overwhelming - it involved being kissed on both cheeks and being made to feel that, for a few moments at least, you were the only person in his life.

He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.