Mstislav Rostropovich, "The Magnificent Maestro" of the NSO

"This was the greatest step of my life -- the greatest!" he recalled. "With my whole soul, I said 'now I will not be silent!' " He addressed his letter to four Soviet papers, all of which refused to publish it -- an eventuality that Rostropovich had foreseen and surmounted by leaking copies to Western journalists.

"Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word?" the letter read, in part. "Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him."

Solzhenitsyn was exiled shortly thereafter, but Rostropovich and his wifewere chastened in a different manner. Their professional engagements dwindled, and their recordings were no longer played on the State radio. When Rostropovich performed with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, only Richter's name appeared in the reviews.

Still, if Rostropovich was treated as a "nonperson" by the Kremlin, he became a hero to Soviet intellectuals. When he played a concert at Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in early 1971, he was greeted ecstatically. "The audience rises and applauds for 10 minutes in one of the few Moscow political demonstrations that cannot be punished," Susan Jacoby wrote in The New York Times Magazine. "Who can take down the names of everyone at the concert? Who is to say the audience is not simply paying tribute to a great musician?"

In May 1974, the Rostropovichs were permitted to leave on a two-year visa. They would not return until 1990, when the NSO made a triumphant debut in the last days of the liberalized Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Three years later, the NSO returned and played the first-ever orchestral concert in Red Square. After the fall of communism, Rostropovich's relations with his native country grew markedly warmer; Russian president Vladimir Putin visited him in the hospital in February and toasted him at an emotional 80th birthday celebration at the Kremlin last month.

I met Rostropovich in 1982, when I was sent to write about him for the Saturday Review. His time was already booked through 1984, it was three days before the NSO was scheduled to leave on a European tour, and the morning rehearsal had gone on too long, putting him a precious hour behind. Yet he greeted me with a hearty bear hug and betrayed not a trace of impatience during the course of our interview. He understood English, but generally answered in Russian, translated by an interpreter.

In the latter part of his career, the number of Rostropovich's conducting appearances just about equaled his performances as a cellist. He was generally considered a mercurial, passionately enthusiastic orchestra leader, always at his best in Russian music. Indeed, he was probably the closest thing we had to a grand, shamanistic maestro in the tradition of Serge Koussevitzky and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Like those legendary conductors of yore, Rostropovich was never mistaken for a flawless technician. Nor did Rostropovich especially care. "There is too much emphasis on technical perfection nowadays, and not enough on what music is actually about -- irony, joy, human suffering, love," he told me.

I had mixed reactions to his conducting. It seemed to me that his performances of the standard repertory could be downright awful -- sloppy and unbridled and seemingly purely impulsive. And yet, when he was inspired, he summoned such eager and electrical playing from his forces that he banished all doubt. At such moments, the NSO musicians seemed happy to respond to Rostropovich's perpetually rudimental stick technique (up and down and down and up) and they gave him more music than they gave to many other, more polished maestros.

And rightly so, for Rostropovich's tumultuous, urgent and ecstatic artistry seemed a virtual embodiment of the great line from Walt Whitman: "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." Let us be glad that we, too, could be there to listen.