Mstislav Rostropovich, Cellist and Conductor, Dies
Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died yesterday in Moscow. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland.Mstislav Rostropovich gave an impromptu concert at Checkpoint Charlie after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
The Russian Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography confirmed that Mr. Rostropovich had died in a Moscow hospital after a long illness. His press secretary would not release the cause of death. Mr. Rostropovich was hospitalized in Paris at the end of January, then decided to fly to Moscow, where he had been in and out of hospitals and sanitoriums since early February, believed to be suffering from intestinal cancer.
He was able to attend a celebration of his 80th birthday on March 27 at the Kremlin, where the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, presented him with a state medal, the Order of Service to the Fatherland, one of many awards and honors Mr. Rostropovich received in his career.
The author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Mr. Rostropovich had sheltered from the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, called the death a “bitter blow to our culture,†the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass reported.
“Farewell, beloved friend,†he said.
Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where the remains of his teachers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev also lie and where his friend Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, was buried on Wednesday.
As a cellist, Mr. Rostropovich played a vast repertory that included works written for him by some of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Among those compositions were Shostakovich Cello Concertos; Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto, Cello Sonata and Symphony-Concerto, and Britten’s Sonata, Cello Symphony and three Suites. He also played the premieres of solo works by Walton, Auric, Kabalevsky and Miaskovsky, and concertos by Lutoslawski, Panufnik, Messiaen, Schnittke, Henri Dutilleux, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Lukas Foss and Giya Kancheli.
Perhaps because his repertory was so broad, Mr. Rostropovich was able to make his cello sing in an extraordinary range of musical accents. In the big Romantic showpieces — the Dvorak, Schumann, Saint-Saëns and Elgar concertos, for example — he dazzled listeners with both his richly personalized interpretations and a majestic warmth of tone. His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality. He could be a firebrand in contemporary works, and he seemed to enjoy producing the unusual timbres that modernist composers often demanded.
As a conductor, he was an individualist. He happily molded tempos, phrase shapes and instrumental balances to suit an interpretive vision that was distinctly his own. And if his work did not suit all tastes, it was widely agreed that the passion he brought to the podium yielded performances that were often as compelling as they were unconventional. He was at his most eloquent, and also his most freewheeling, in Russian music, particularly in the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
