Mstislav Rostropovich, affectionately known as Slava, (Glory) was born in 1927 in Azerbaijan. His father, of Polish descent, was a cellist and had been a pupil of Pablo Casals. His mother, a Russian Jew, was a pianist. The earliest photo of him shows him lying in his father’s cello case, which served as his cot. As soon as he could walk he would seize a broom to imitate the gestures of his father playing the cello. Slava began composing at age 4, when he began studying the piano with his mother and began cello lessons with his father at age 8.
He began his cello teaching career at 14. He attended the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied cello, piano, and conducting and his composition teacher was Dmitri Shostakovich. Rostropovich composed quite a bit until his 2nd year at the conservatory when he heard the 1st rehearsal of Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony. He was so impressed he decided to give up composition.
In 1948 Stalin declared Kathaturian, Prokofiev and Shostakovich to be enemies of the people, resulting in the ban on their music, and Shostokovich losing his teaching positions at the conservatories in Leningrad and Moscow. The 21-year-old Rostropovich quit the conservatory, dropping out in protest. The persecution of Prokoviev and Shostakovich was so horrific that in 1951 neither composer had enough money for food. Rostropovich became a champion of both composers’ music. Rostropovich was a phenomenal virtuoso.
At age 23 Rostropovich was the recipient of the highest award in the Soviet Union, the Stalin Prize.
In 1955 he married the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, with whom he had two daughters. Any Western influences, even jeans were unavailable and prohibited in the former Soviet Union. When his daughters became teenagers, their mother had purchased them jeans on one of her foreign tours. Slava poured gasoline over them a set them on fire!
Rostropovich made his U.S. cello debut in 1956. He was an extremely disciplined musician. He learned and memorized Shostakovich’s 1st Cello Concerto in just 3 days by practicing it 10 hours the 1st day, 10 hours the 2nd day and 8 hours the 3rd day! And his standards were incredibly high. He didn’t record Bach’s 6 Unaccompanied Cello Suites until he was 63 because he hadn’t felt he was ready yet.
Rostropovich was not only one of the greatest cellists that ever lived, he was also a conductor, and a fine pianist. He had a phenomenal memory, and was able to play all of his repertoire, even new compositions written especially for him in a record, short amount of time. In fact, he accompanied his wife, for 35 years, and he played all those performances from memory as well.
She and his student Xavier Phillips explained that he had a way of singing on the cello.
He became one of the most honored and treasured artists of the Soviet Union. But the recognition from the government didn’t come easily because he was not a Communist Party member.
Slava greatly enlarged the cello repertoire exponentially by commissioning hundreds of new works for the cello. 243 cello compositions were written for him! Among the many composers who wrote cello compositions for him was Benjamin Britten, with whom he was great friends. On his deathbed, when Rostropovich listened to the recording he had made with Britten of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, he was moved to tears of joy.
His former teacher and next-door neighbor, Dmitri Shostakovich, wrote 2 cello concertos for him. Rostropovich said of Shostakovich, “He was the most important man in my life, after my father. And 5 months before Rostropovich’s death he created the Shostakovich museum in St. Petersburg by purchasing the apartment where Shostakovich lived as a youth, and donated the museum to the city of St. Petersburg, with the stipulation that its archives be made available to scholars.
Rostropovich made his conducting debut in 1961.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, describes the life of a Soviet forced labor camp prisoner. In 1945 Solzhenitsyn had criticized Stalin in a letter, and was then arrested and spent 8 years in prisons and labor camps after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and helped raise global awareness of its forced labor camp system.
In 1969 he was very ill and living in an unheated house. Rostropovich invited Solzhenitsyn to live in the empty caretaker’s apartment in his country home. S was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was ruthlessly persecuted. He was expelled from the writers’ union, and none of his other writings were published in Russia.
Not only did Rostropovich take the courageous action of housing an enemy of the people, the country’s most famous dissident writer, he also fired off an angry, blistering letter to the media attacking the Soviet government’s censorship of the arts, suppression of ideas, and human rights abuses. And it was published by the foreign press. It reads in part: “Why do decisions about our literature and our art so often belong to people who are absolutely incompetent in these fields?…Each human being must have the right to think for himself and to express his opinion without fear.”
Slava and Galina were then persecuted. Their passports were confiscated. Their home was put under 24-hour KGB surveillance. His foreign concert tours were cancelled and his performances in all major Russian cities were curtailed. Their home was put under 24 KGB surveillance. His name was removed from all programs and publications. His letters to Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, went unanswered. Virtually the only places he was allowed to perform were in remote parts of the Soviet Union.
Rostropovich found his concerts canceled. People were told he was ill. His recordings were suppressed. His concerts in smaller provincial towns were canceled arbitrarily, even after he had arrived or while he was making his way to a town. Frequently there were no notices of his performances in the press and no posters were to be seen, and so he often played to practically empty halls. Sometimes his name disappeared altogether from concert programs, reviews and publicity.
He said: “Many times Solzhenitsen told us maybe I go from your house to make life a little bit easier for you, but my wife and I could not accept this. I tell you, if you ask me what I made in my life the best step, I’ll tell you, that’s found in music, but in my life, the best step was only that one-page letter, and since that moment my conscience was clean and clear.” Solzhenitsen was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.
Galina: “It all happened as I predicted like reading from a book. They hurled him from great heights down to the ground. He was banned from playing in big halls. They simply didn’t give him halls to play in. He traveled only to small towns, playing with very bad orchestras. I watched him simply fading away. His shoulders were stooped. His back seemed hunched, Of course, it could have all ended very badly in catastrophe. In Russia you usually drown your sorrows in the bottle, become a vodka addict, and then…”
Incredibly some of his musical colleagues began to question his musicianship, both as cellist and conductor. And even more incredibly, Rostropovich began to believe them.
In March of 1974 at Galina’s instigation, Slava wrote to Brezhnev, requesting to work abroad for two years. Slava had become terribly depressed. His wife wrote: “He would go quietly into the kitchen and weep. That most intelligent of men, that brilliant artist…was tortured by the realization that they were letting him go so easily.”
Just before he left, Slava was rehearsing a new production of Die Fledermaus in Moscow. As Galina remembered: “He was called into the office of the theatre’s artistic director: ‘You know, Slava, I must have a serious talk with you…We can’t let you conduct our orchestra…But, well…how can I put it to you gently? As a musician, you’ve degenerated much too much, and we simply can’t entrust you with a premiere for our theatre. Yes, yes–now don’t take offense–as a musician you’ve gone downhill.’
Slava had only strength enough to walk out of the theatre, cross the street, and hide in the first doorway, where he burst into sobs. Slava’s friends and students came to the airport to see him off…The send-off was more like a funeral.”
He left with one suitcase, two cellos and his Newfoundland dog. His wife and daughters joined him two months later.
The great irony is that after he was punished and censored in Russia, he settled in the U.S. and in 1977 was appointed chief conductor of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., a position he held for 17 years.
When the orchestra went on strike for high wages, he joined the musicians, and wouldn’t cross the picket line.
In 1978 Rostropovich and Galina were stripped of their Soviet citizenships. The exile lasted 16 years. It helped make him an international celebrity.
In 1989, from his Paris apartment, Slava heard on the radio that crowds of demonstrators had gathered at the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. He immediately traveled there and played an impromptu performance of the Sarabande from Bach’s 2nd Cello Suite.
He returned to Russia in 1990 conducting the National Symphony from Washington in Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony, one of the composer’s most tragic compositions, that depicts the terror of the Stalin regime. He also conducted Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony during that visit.
When he learned about the attempted coup in August of 1991, he rushed to Moscow by immediately purchasing an airline ticket from Paris to Tokyo, which stopped in Moscow, because he didn’t have a visa. He got off the plane in Moscow and talked his way through passport control. The famous photo of the soldier asleep on Slava’s shoulder while Rostropovich held his rifle, has been published all over the world.
In 1993 he returned to Russia with his National Symphony. His piano soloist for the tour was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son. Rostropovich conducted Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in Red Square for an audience of 100,000 to commemorate the centennial of Tchaikovsky’s death.
In 1992 he and Galina founded the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation, which led to more than 2 million children being immunized against hepatitis B. The foundation has provided medical equipment for children’s clinics in St. Petersburg, Orienburg and other villages and towns, and also developed a vaccination program for measles, mumps and rubella in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Lithuania.
1997 he founded the Rostropovich Foundation to provide scholarships and grants to hundreds of young Russian musicians of outstanding talent. Additionally, Rostropovich helped an enormous number of people, often quietly and anonymously.
Rostropovich was an ambassador for UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He was the recipient of many honorary doctorate degrees, and more than 16 major awards from Russia, the International League of Human Rights, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, and top awards and honors from Japan, Austria, Azerbaijan, Argentina, Belgium, Hungary, Venezuela, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the U.S., Taiwan, Finland, France, Sweden, Ecuador, and Great Britain. The house in Baku Azerbaijan where his family lived in the 1920s is now the Leopold and Mstislav Rostropovich Home-Museum.
He was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2006 and died peacefully, less than a year later at age 80.