Cellist-Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich Dies at 80

But his musical career was beginning to flourish. During the decade of the 1950s he would win the Lenin Prize, two Stalin Prizes and the Award of People's Artist of the USSR. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Kremlin decreed the rehabilitation of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and they were restored to good artistic standing. Rostropovich returned to the Moscow Conservatory as a teacher.

In 1955 he went to Prague to judge a cello competition. There he met an engaging and attractive soprano with the Bolshoi Opera Company, Galina Vishnevskaya. Four days later they were married. Over the ensuing years, they would tour together. In addition to playing cello, Rostropovich would play piano as accompanist for his wife's recitals. They also did separate artistic tours. They had two daughters, Olgaand Yelena Both girls would become musicians.

A thaw in relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in this period was followed by an agreement on cultural exchanges, and Rostropovich was among the Soviet artists allowed to perform in the West. He was stunning in his American debut at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1956, and the echoes of this triumph reverberated in Moscow where it was seen as evidence of the cultural superiority of Russian socialism over the decadence of the capitalistic United States.

This made Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya celebrated artists of the USSR, and they were accorded the privileges of the Soviet elite. They had a spacious apartment in Moscow and a country house in an exclusive area reserved for high officials and leading artists. They had a car and servants at their disposal. They were encouraged to travel outside the Soviet Union, and they met the major Western musicians and composers. By the mid-1960s, Rostropovich was ranked with Casals as a master world-class cellist.

Although he insisted he was an "artist and musician, not a politician," he was unable to remain silent and politically neutral. He spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya invited writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to stay in their country dacha outside Moscow in the late 1960s. Solzhenitsyn would win a Nobel Prize for literature, but this only brought intensified vilification from the Soviet leadership. Still, he got shelter and support at the Rostropovich dacha, and the Rostropovichs were outspoken in their denunciations of those who were attacking the writer.

In a letter to four Soviet newspapers, they excoriated government censorship, and they recalled the attacks on composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich during the Stalinist era. "Why is it?" they asked, "that in our literature and our art, the decisive word so often belongs to people who are absolutely incompetent in these fields?"

When the Soviet media refused to print their letter, they took it to the Western press, where its publication provoked a storm of controversy.

Soviet officials responded with an effort to subvert Rostropovich's standing as a musician. He was forbidden to travel outside the Soviet Union and was no longer allowed to perform with the best orchestras or play in the great concert halls of the major Soviet cities. In 1974, after a personal plea from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, the travel ban was lifted. He was issued a passport and with his wife he came to the United States.

"I was born anew," Rostropovich later told Time magazine. "I found a great deal more in music than I did when I lived in the Soviet Union. I reexamined everything and I could see everything more vividly. All composers, even Beethoven, came to mean more."

He didn't speak the language of his new country, he had nowhere to live and he had no real friends, but he found a place in Washington to rebuild his career.

In his first press conference as music director of the national symphony, he said his model in this role would be Serge Koussevitzky, another Russian emigre musician who in 25 years as music director of the Boston Symphony had built the organization into a first-class orchestra.

In his role as National Symphony music director, Rostropovich not only conducted the orchestra; he also hired and fired its musicians, persuaded name soloists and guest conductors to come to Washington, performed a variety of public relations chores, helped with fundraising and represented the orchestra at social functions.