Cellist-Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich Dies at 80

His musical favorites were the compositions of the Russian classical masters. Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," performed outdoors and complete with a battery of real cannons, was always a grand spectacle, and loved by audiences everywhere.

From the day he became musical director of the National Symphony it had been his dream that one day he would go back to Russia with his orchestra to play Russian music for his native countrymen. "Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich," he said, "those are the things I would like to show them how to play."

He had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1978 after befriending political dissidents, and for years he was forced to live in exile. But in February 1990, he was allowed to return. His citizenship was restored and at the invitation of the Soviet government he led the National Symphony in concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. At the Moscow Conservatory's Great Hall, packed with high-ranking officials including Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet premiere, Rostropovich led the National Symphony in a program filled with sad music, including Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony and Shostakovich's anguished Fifth Symphony, which was written at the height of the Stalinist purges in 1937.

For his final encore, he chose an American classic, John Philip Sousa's rousing "Stars and Stripes Forever," the traditional finale of the National Symphony's annual Fourth-of-July concert on the West Lawn of the Capitol in Washington. The Moscow audience responded with a standing ovation. Later, amidst bear hugs and vodka toasts at a post-concert reception at the U.S. Embassy, Rostropovich was asked why he'd picked the "Stars and Stripes Forever." The idea, he said, came "from the heart."

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku, a port on the Caspian Sea in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. His family was of mixed Polish, Czech, German, French, Lithuanian and Russian ancestry, with a musical heritage of several generations.

His father, Leopold, was a cellist who had studied under Casals, and his grandfather was a pianist. His mother also was a pianist, and his maternal grandmother had been director of a music school in the Ural Mountains. An older sister, Veronkia, would become a violinist with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1931 the family moved to Moscow where Leopold Rostropovich taught music and played cello with a radio orchestra. At 4, Rostropovich taught himself to play the piano. Under the tutelage of his father he made his cello debut at 8, accompanied by his sister on a violin. He attended a school for musically gifted children and graduated in 1941, the same year Nazi Germany launched its massive invasion, bringing the Soviet Union into World War II.

As the German army advanced on Moscow, the family was evacuated east to Orenburg, where in 1942 Leopold Rostropovich died. As the war continued the younger Rostropovich, now a teenager, played his cello for wounded troops, and for war workers on the home front as far east as Siberia.

These were years of extreme hardship. Food was scarce as were most of the basic necessities of life. Poverty, hunger, sickness and cold were omnipresent. Strangers came to the assistance of the Rostropovich family. Years later, as a world famous musician, Rostropovich would remember this period as a time when he began to feel "the goodness of people for the first time," and he forged deep emotional and spiritual bonds with his native countrymen that would last a lifetime.

In 1943, with the German army now in retreat, Rostropovich returned to Moscow with his mother and sister and began studying music at the Moscow Conservatory. He studied composition with Shostakovich, who became his friend and mentor.

In 1948, a time of high Cold War tension, the Soviet government attacked Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and other modern composers for "formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies alien to the Soviet people." Many of their compositions were banned, and Shostakovich was removed from the Moscow Conservatory faculty. In a gesture of solidarity, Rostropovich promptly resigned from the conservatory.

He moved into the home of the aging Prokofiev, and he lived with the composer until his death in 1953. After the events of 1948, Rostropovich would later admit, he was convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with the Soviet system, and he no longer trusted the government.