Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich stood among the foremost cellists and conductors of the twentieth century, his intense and technically brilliant approach often mirroring the upheavals he endured, among them banishment from the Soviet Union of his birth. Beyond projecting a rich, resonant tone across every range of the cello, he commanded the idioms of every period and national tradition within the standard repertoire available during his era. An ardent champion of contemporary music, he introduced more than one hundred new compositions, among them Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata in C, Op. 119, written expressly for him and unveiled in 1950. Shostakovich likewise entrusted him with both of his cello concertos, the first composed in 1959 and the second in 1966, each given its premiere by the cellist. Rostropovich made his conducting debut in Gorky in 1962; five years afterward he led Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi for the first time.

An open letter he published in 1970 defending the dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brought canceled engagements and, ultimately, expulsion from the Soviet Union. While living abroad his citizenship was stripped in 1974, the same year he received an International League of Human Rights medal; a Time magazine cover story appeared three years later. In November 1989, learning that crowds were assembling at the Berlin Wall, he arranged a flight from Paris and played the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2 at Checkpoint Charlie amid the dismantling of sections of the barrier. Soviet citizenship was restored the following year. His definitive recording of the complete Bach Cello Suites was issued in 1995. He attended an eightieth-birthday tribute at the Kremlin one month before his death from intestinal cancer in April 2007.

Born Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, familiarly called Slava, to professional musicians in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, on March 27, 1927, he grew up with a cellist father, Leopold, and a pianist mother. The family relocated to Moscow in 1931 after Leopold accepted a teaching post at the Gnessin Institute. Already studying cello with his father at age four, Slava gave his debut recital at eight. He attended the Central Music School from 1939 until 1941 and entered the Moscow Conservatory two years later, where Semyon Kozolupov instructed him in cello and Vissarion Shebalin and Dmitry Shostakovich taught composition.

After graduating in 1948 he became Prokofiev’s music secretary, an association that prompted the composer to recast his earlier Cello Concerto in E Minor into the more substantial Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 125. Rostropovich captured first prize at the International Competition for Cellists in Prague in 1950 and began appearing across Russia; his initial Western engagement took place in Florence in 1951. Following Prokofiev’s death in 1953, Rostropovich and Dmitri Kabalevsky finished the composer’s incomplete Cello Concertino in G Minor, Op. 132.

He wed Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in 1955. Their planned Western tour for 1956 was blocked by President Nikolai Bulganin, who had pursued Vishnevskaya romantically, until Nikita Khrushchev restored the itinerary after prevailing in a power struggle. Rostropovich appeared at London’s Festival Hall in March and at Carnegie Hall in April, instantly hailed as an international luminary. Back in the U.S.S.R., composers, including Shostakovich, competed to write for him; the first of Shostakovich’s concertos reached the West through a recording with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, inaugurating an important series of Western releases. Benjamin Britten, present at the London premiere, formed a lasting friendship that yielded five cello works—three solo suites, a sonata, and the Cello Symphony—plus a song cycle for Vishnevskaya.

Rostropovich’s 1970 letter protesting official treatment of Solzhenitsyn circulated abroad and embarrassed the authorities, resulting in canceled performances and Vishnevskaya’s removal from the Bolshoi roster. In 1974 the government permitted a two-year Western visit, then revoked their citizenship. Rostropovich acquired the famed “Duport” Stradivarius and, that July, premiered Aram Khachaturian’s cello concerto in Monte Carlo under the composer’s direction. He made his London conducting debut with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in September and his American conducting debut with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., in March 1975; he served as the orchestra’s music director and principal conductor from 1977 for seventeen years.

His spontaneous performance at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989, captured on film, prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to rescind the expulsion. The cellist’s return was chronicled in the documentary Soldiers of Music (1991). He stood with Boris Yeltsin during the events that precipitated the Soviet collapse. Rostropovich relinquished leadership of the Washington orchestra in 1994 yet continued appearing worldwide as cellist and conductor. His 1991 recordings of Bach’s six suites, the first he had made of the works, were released by Warner Classics and EMI Classics in 1995, regarded as the summation of a lifetime’s engagement with the masterpieces; that year he received the Polar Music Prize. The Rostropovich Home Museum opened in Baku in 2002. Despite failing health he attended his eightieth-birthday celebration at the Kremlin in March 2007. A statue depicting him playing the cello was unveiled in Moscow in 2012 on the date that would have marked his eighty-fifth birthday.