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‘Since I am so busy, my wife not see me, and my children not see me, so they not tellme to stop. No, no, I not stop.’ Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor, philanthropist,

Soviet dissident – not to mention the world’s greatest living cellist – laughs his croakylaugh at the suggestion that, at 77, the time may have come for him to slow down. Hesmooths his tie over his stocky torso, stretches back on the sofa and sets his robust chininto a seraphic grin.

We meet on a November evening at his home in west London, the walls hung withRussian Orthodox icons and vast 20th-century oil paintings. He’s in the middle of anaverage week. He’s in Britain to attend a concert of young Russian musicians funded by one of his many charitable foundations; he’s here as the President of the YehudiMenuhin School (‘Yehudi, when he still alive, he ask me, “Please, I dying, come insteadof me”’); and he’s conducting two concerts – including pieces by his ‘gods’ Prokofievand Shostakovich – at the Barbican (both will be greeted with standing ovations). He’sjust come from Frankfurt – where he was presented with ‘a big cheque’ at anothercharitable concert – and then he’s off to Paris. And so he goes on, conducting, perform-ing, raising money – mainly for causes in Russia such as sick children, vaccinationsand maternity hospitals – generally living up to his nickname, Slava, meaning ‘glory’.

Glory, indeed. Rostropovich does everything con brio: conducting an orchestra withturbulent gestures; launching into a cello concerto; bear-hugging his performers at the end of a concert; or simply talking on an autumn evening. His English, syntacti-cally choppy but – elaborated with waving hands, ‘ah-ah-ahs’, and grunts – easy tounderstand, is littered with ‘incredibles’, ‘fantastics’ and ‘bravas’. He loves an anecdote,and when he gets particularly carried away plunges into a sea of Russian, requiring theservices of a patient translator, whom he then overrules with blasts of staccato English.

There are few of his kind left. The other great cellists of his generation – Jacqueline duPré and Paul Tortelier – are dead; Menuhin is dead; the pianist Sviatoslav Richter is

Facing the music

His playing inspired some of the greatest

concertos of the past century, and is still

considered without equal in the world

today, yet Mstislav Rostropovich has always

concerned himself with more than mere

melodies. Here the masterly Russian cellist

and conductor recalls standing up to Stalin,

saving Solzhenitsyn and drinking vodka

with Shostakovich. By Tim Auld

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID SPERO

Mstislav Rostropovich at his homein Maida Vale, London

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dead. Rostropovich can claim to be, as Maxim Vengerov, the violinist andtorch-bearer for a new generation of virtuosi, recently said, ‘the worldambassador of classical music – the last of that generation who cancommunicate music’s wonder. He is the link for younger generations tothose geniuses Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and others like Britten, all ofwhom he knew well.’ He not only knew them, but inspired them andothers to write some of the greatest music of the past century – over 170premières, doubling the size of the cello repertoire.

But it is as much for the integrity with which he has lived his life – firstin the USSR, where he was vilified for his refusal to betray his friendsAlexander Solzhenitsyn and the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; andlatterly as an exile from his homeland – as for the brilliance of his play-ing, that Rostropovich has won friends and admirers worldwide.

With so many achievements behind him, and so much adulation,what drives him on? The fact, he tellsme, that he lost everything, and then,somehow, was given a second chance.‘This side of my life, when I can give, it gives me energy,’ he says, his voice sombre. ‘When I come from Russia [in1974] I start a new life here. In that mytwo daughters have children and theymake a big family, that’s difficult. At thebeginning it was very difficult. And nowI have the possibility to help…’ Hebreaks off and holds out his palms as ifto say, ‘Wouldn’t everyone?’

Rostropovich was born into a musical family – his father a cellist, hismother a pianist, his sister a violinist – in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1927.

His parents could ill afford a second child, and, with macabre glee,Rostropovich tells a story about his mother’s attempts to abort him. Inthe end he spent ten months in the womb. He moulds his face into a grimace: ‘I’d say to my mother, “You had one more month to work onme – couldn’t you have made me a better face?” And she’d answer, “Butmy son, I was busy making your hands.” And that’s right, that’s right.’

Those hands began to play the piano aged four, and picked up a cellonot long afterwards. The family moved to Moscow when Rostropovichwas five, and there, in a communal apartment, Rostropovich honed histechnique – or, as he prefers to tell it, found sly ways to avoid practising(a habit, his wife has said, which persists to this day). ‘I wasn’t a badactor, actually,’ he recalls. ‘When Father and Mother put their coats onto go out I would take my cello and start playing. We lived on the thirdfloor in Moscow, and I could stay for four hours by the window waitingto see when they are coming back down the road. And after four hours I see they come back and I start to play my cello again and pretend I’mso tired when my parents come in. And my mother would say, “Stop,stop, my son. You so, so tired,” and give me chocolate.’

When Rostropovich was 15 his father died, and to support the familyhe sold makeshift oil-lamps constructed from medical test-tubes, andplayed countless concerts. He enrolled as a student at the MoscowConservatory, completed the five-year course in three, and graduated at19 with a gold medal. It was there that he met Shostakovich.

Shostakovich was Rostropovich’s orchestration tutor, but he alsobecame a mentor and, later, collaborator and dear friend. The merethought of Shostakovich brings tears of joy to Rostropovich’s eyes, andhe embarks on an anecdote about a shopping trip the two men made tobuy Rostropovich a tuxedo in 1945 (‘I try on tuxedo. “Fantastic, Slava,”he says. “It’s made just for you”’), followed by a visit to a flea market tofind some vodka to drink a toast to the tuxedo. ‘I can tell you, I was only17 at the time. Now I am 77,’ says Rostropovich. ‘But never in my life I drank anything worse than that. We both just spat it out. Shostakovichhad such suffering on his face, and he said, “Imagine how it could hap-pen that a woman with such a nice, pleasant face – how that possibleshe sell that?”’ (It must have tasted truly terrible, because elsewhereRostropovich has said of Shostakovich, ‘He was a prodigious drinker – a true professional when it came to putting away copious amounts of

vodka’, and Rostropovich, as footage in a 1990 documentary about his return toRussia shows, is by no means an ama-teur at putting the stuff away himself.)

But such larks must have been fewand far between in Stalin’s postwarUSSR; within three years a sombremood had descended on the country’smusicians. In 1948 Andrei Zhdanov,Stalin’s cultural enforcer, denouncedShostakovich and Prokofiev and bannedperformances of their work. Both menwere reduced to poverty.

The ban lasted three years, duringwhich time both men were reduced to poverty. What was the effect onShostakovich? ‘He was traumatised,'says Rostropovich, ‘and after the banwas lifted he so afraid that a new enact-ment would appear. Once he came tomy home and he was crying, and hesaid, “I am so afraid that if they againban my work how many hungry peoplein my family will there be around me?”’

Later in his life Shostakovich joined the Communist party and signeda letter denouncing Sakharov. Since his death in 1974 historians havefiercely debated whether the composer was, at heart, a dissident or a supporter of the regime. Rostropovich is in no doubt about his friend’sallegiances: ‘I can tell you I know he was absolutely contra Communismin the inside. But so covered. Why? Because he suffer trauma in 1948.’

Twenty years later Rostropovich would find himself similarly trauma-tised by the oppressors of the Soviet regime, but in the meantime heplayed on, winning international competitions, and teaching at theMoscow Conservatory. He also met and married – within four passionatedays in 1955 – the diva of the Bolshoi Opera, Galina Vishnevskaya, andhad two daughters. He became wealth, with three cars and a dacha out-side Moscow, and his tours abroad allowed him to meet and inspire greatcomposers like Benjamin Britten (his third ‘god’) and Leonard Bernstein.

But it was his friendship with another Russian, the dissident writerAlexander Solzhenitsyn, which nearly cost him his career, his family,and his liberty. Solzhenitsyn had already spent seven years in a labourcamp for his criticism of Stalin, and had caused a sensation with thepublication in 1962 of his novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,based upon that experience. By the time Rostropovich and he becamefriends in the late 1960s Solzhenitsyn had again fallen foul of theKremlin, and his work had been banned. In 1969 Rostropovich learntthat Solzhenitsyn had been forced to live in poverty in a tool-shed, withno heat or running water. He went to visit him, and, horrified by theconditions, offered the writer a cottage in the garden of his dacha. ➤

Rostropovich playing Bach after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

‘Solzhenitsyn said,“You and I won’t traveltogether any more. It’s too cheap for themto swat both of us withthe same truck”’

Rostropovich’s gesture did not go unnoticed. ‘Two ministers come tome and tell me in winter I must kick out from my house Solzhenitsyn,’he recalls. ‘But I say, “It’s winter, 35 degrees below zero, I not kick asmall mouse out of my home.”’ He didn’t leave it at that. He composedan open letter challenging the government’s treatment of the writer,and sent it to four newspapers. (After this Solzhenitsyn told him, ‘Well,now you and I won’t drive in the same car any more. It’s too cheap forthem if they swat the two of us together with the same truck.’)

Did he consider what this ideological protest might mean for hisfamily? ‘But my dear, my dear,’ he says, roused. ‘That’s not ideological.You know, I don’t know how possible to change another’s ideology.That’s just human, that’s all.’ Ideological, human, whatever – BigBrother cancelled Rostropovich’s concerts and his wife’s concerts, too.When Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974 Rostropovich askedBrezhnev to allow him and his family to go abroad for two years. Totheir surprise, their wish was granted. But the elation was short-lived.In 1978, having received permission to extend their stay in the West,they learnt that they had been stripped of their Soviet citizenship ‘foracts harmful to the prestige of the USSR’. They couldn’t go back.

It was a terrible time. Rostropovich has said that he contemplatedsuicide. But the concerts came, and the applause came, and in 1977 he was made conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in

Washington. Then the unthinkable happened: the Iron Curtain camedown and, in 1990, Rostropovich returned to Moscow, a Russian citizen, to conduct Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony to packed houses.

A year later he was back under very different circumstances, stand-ing alongside Boris Yeltsin in the Russian parliament at the height ofthe coup which planned to turn back the clock to the dark days ofCommunism. Rostropovich had heard the news of tanks on the streetsat his home in Paris, leapt on a plane to Russia – without consulting hiswife or daughters – and blagged his way across Moscow and into theparliament building. What did he think he would achieve?

‘I was 100 per cent sure I would be killed,’ he tells me. ‘It was very dif-ficult to imagine that this coup can fail, because they have such power– they had tanks, they had army. And I thought that many people canbe killed here. I knew they can kill me, but then’ – he smiles – ‘my con-certs would have to be cancelled, and they wouldn’t like that. I neverthought they would fail. It was the greatest miracle of my entire life.’

And so Rostropovich continues to work. He’s back in London nextsummer to conduct two concerts with the LSO, and, after years of tur-moil, has found a kind of peace, albeit a frenetic one.

‘And that’s why I’m so happy,’ he says, striking the table. ‘That’s whyI’m full of energy at 77 years old, because my conscience very cleanand clear. I never make wrong words at these people who I love.’ ●

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, isreleased on LSO Live on 12 January; the Eighth Symphony on 9 May

Rostropovich (left) with his friend and mentor Shostakovich