Obituary: Mstislav Rostropovich: A superb Russian cellist and conductor
whose humanity and moral stature matched his musical eminence
DESI DILLINGHAM AND TULLY POTTER, The Guardian – United Kingdom
Published: Apr 28, 2007
Cello playing in the 20th century was dominated by two outsize
personalities. If the first half belonged to Pablo Casals, the second
half was equally emphatically bestridden by Mstislav Rostropovich, who
has died aged 80. They were both not just superb all-round musicians,
but moral forces who stood out against tyranny and injustice.
Rostropovich’s birth – in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, 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, and 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 second world 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-Saens 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 Dmitri 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, Nikolai Miaskovsky
and Sergei Prokofiev when they had been denounced by the Kremlin in
1948, he gained their friendship, and 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.
Around this time 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 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. 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 Cello Concerto but gave
it up after a few performances because he did not think he could
match his pupil Jacqueline du Pre.
His 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 in Moscow in 1964.
Two years later, Shostakovich wrote a second concerto for
Rostropovich which 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. He taught
from 1953. 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 musical outsiders 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.
Yet faced with stark choices, Rostropovich was ready to sacrifice
everything. The support he and his wife gave Alexander Solzhenitsyn 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 they were exiled
in 1974 and became "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 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, on the concert stage and in
the recording studio. They returned on tour to Russia in February
1990, and 18 months later Rostropovich flew in from Paris to help
bolster the opposition of Boris Yeltsin (obituary, April 24) to 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.
Yeltsin later wrote that Rostropovich’s 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 was
playing the cello all night was a major factor in dissuading the
troops outside from shelling the White House. The musician 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 forgiven everyone, he was going to enjoy himself. This
reconciliation was reflected last February in acceptance from President
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".
In his later years the cellist turned more to conducting, notably
with the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC (1977-94), and in
Britain as a guest with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony
orchestras. This career move did not meet with universal approval,
as his success was patchy. His tempi could be turgid and the moments
of unique 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 Alfred Schnittke.
As the years went by even his cello playing became more eccentric. His
interpretation of the Dvorak Cello 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, with 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. A 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
personality carried all before it and his actual playing, wonderfully
secure in tone and technique even in the fastest passages, was in
a class of its own. When he stopped playing in public in 2005, the
refulgent sound of his cello was much missed.
Rostropovich was an artist 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, Olga and Elena.
Tully Potter
Robert Ponsonby writes: When the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra came
to the Edinburgh Festival in 1960, its conductors were Evgeny Mravinsky
and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. Its only soloist was Rostropovich, who
contributed Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto and, in recital,
Brahms, Bach and Prokofiev – impassioned, bravura performances, all
technically immaculate and glowing with the warmth of his personality.
He was a star of the festival and I asked him to play in the Toy
Symphony which I was to conduct on its last day. He happily agreed
and suggested that Rozhdestvensky join him. So I allocated them the
triangle, though which of them held the instrument and which hit it
I do not now remember. They were of course note-perfect (as were
Leonide Massine on rattle and the conductors Vittorio Gui on drum
and Alexander Gibson on nightingale). Slava was enchanted and asked
for the score and parts to take back to Moscow.
He subsequently came to the Glasgow Proms and delivered a marvellous
Dvorak concerto. It was a Saturday night and when I took him to his
train, he could not but notice the unbridled conduct of Glaswegian
youth. "Kissing?" he said, with a kind of benignly quizzical curiosity.
Then, in 1984, I was the guest of conductor Paul Sacher at a concert
in Basel when Slava again played the Dvorak concerto. Self-evidently
he was in terrific form, and at dinner afterwards announced that
he wished to demonstrate that you could get a champagne cork out of
the bottle with a sabre, if you had one. And it so happened that he
did. It hung from his waist in a military scabbard.
Within a minute, by dint of downward slashing and hacking, the
cork was out (with much champagne). The demonstration had been so
rapturously received that – at the brandy stage – Slava announced
that he would repeat it. I held my breath as the second cork came
out during a slightly tipsy, rather sentimental, quintessentially
Russian, monologue in praise of Sacher. As before, those precious hands
survived, and I was in due course embraced in a tremendous bear-hug.
His humanity matched both his musical eminence and his political
bravado. He was often impulsive, boyish, mischievous, on one occasion
muddling up all the shoes left outside bedroom doors for polishing
in the hotel where he was staying. This was, I think, during a
holiday he arranged for Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, whom he
venerated. Pears’s diary, published privately as Armenian Holiday –
August 1965, paints an enchanting portrait of a glorious musician
and a glorious man. Tully Potter
Desi Dillingham writes: I had the honour of being Slava’s neighbour and
friend in Little Venice, west London, for the last 18 years. He was
a delight, often phoning to ask for a special favour – and often one
that would not be easy to deliver – such as a dinner party for 10 in
his flat that evening. The request would always end with "if you can’t
help me, I suicide immediate". He spoke, it was said, 10 languages,
none of them well.
In return, he swept myself and Virginia Devaal, another London
friend whose help he had called on, off to Russia. The last big
outing came in May 2005, to Moscow, for his and Galina’s 50th wedding
anniversary. There was a member of every royal family of Europe there
(except the Prince of Wales, since he was on his honeymoon) to help
celebrate, as well as Yeltsin.
Putin telephoned halfway through the evening to award Slava the
Peter the Great Medal – the first time it had been given out since
the October 1917 revolution. Indeed, this was the first time so many
royals had been on Russian soil together since then.
Slava was a great humanitarian, giving concerts all round the world
for all sorts of charities – for the street children of Brazil,
for causes supported by US presidents, and for children in Russia.
He was fully aware of his good fortune. Many times he would say after
an emotional standing ovation at the end of a concert that he had
"more friends there" (pointing to heaven) than here.
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, cellist, pianist and conductor,
born March 27 1927; died April 27 2007