What Made Slava Run?

The multitude of tributes to the late Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who died last week in Moscow at age 80, dealt with the "public myth" of this famed musician, as Italy's Il Giornale put it. In November 1989, after the Berlin Wall was breached, Rostropovich hopped on the private jet of his friend the French tycoon Antoine Riboud, founder and CEO of the food giant Danone, in order to play the cello beside the Wall, a moment that was televised around the world. In 1991, in a no-less publicized gesture, Rostropovich flew to Russia to support his friend Boris Yeltsin during an abortive coup d'état. By then Rostropovich had spent a dozen years in luxurious exile in Paris, after his famous public defense of his friends the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and physicist Andrei Sakharov, causing Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev to try to obliterate Rostropovich's career, even canceling his Russian citizenship in 1978.

That career had previously flourished under Soviet rule, bringing Rostropovich the Lenin Prize, two Stalin Prizes, and the coveted status of "People's Artist of the USSR," with all the attendant privileges and luxuries denied less favored musicians. This young Rostropovich can be seen today on compelling DVDs from EMI Classics, performing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 during a 1961 visit to London, and Beethoven's Cello Sonatas with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter in a filmed 1964 Edinburgh, Scotland, concert. The bald, 30-something Rostropovich looks like he is already in late middle age, but plays with a youthful intensity. The simian thrust of his sloped shoulders and jutting chin, combined with startlingly elongated fingers like articulated linguine, make for thrilling performances indeed. When playing at full force, or as quickly as possible, Rostropovich dazzled with the sheer expressive possibilities of his instrument. He claimed to hear romantic symphonic music when he performed, as he told the journalist Tim Janof: "My ‘big sound' concept on the cello therefore came from my desire for a more orchestral scale projection. I don't hear a cello sound when I play, I hear an orchestra."

This approach made him a superstar in the West, jetting around the world to concertize, using a passport issued to him by the Principality of Monaco. Although disappointingly inconsistent as a conductor, he captured his audience with rollicking encores of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," and theatrical podium gestures such as kissing the musical score after leading London concerts in 2004 of his friend and mentor Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. He was in perpetual motion, the archetypal frequent flyer. Fifteen years ago, I visited Rostropovich at his Paris apartment on the Avenue Georges Mandel in the ritzy 16th arrondissement — Maria Callas died in an apartment nearby in 1977 — and found much-prized realty used as a kind of storeroom. Quantities of chandeliers, traveling trunks, and other objects cluttered the living room, as well as kitschy enameled boxes depicting Rostropovich's wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in famous Bolshoi opera roles including an "Aida" in unconvincing blackface. A team of Russian maidservants stood ready to iron the Maestro's multitude of tuxedos and shirts needed for his brutal travel schedule. Despite the disarray, the musician I met that day was alert, voluble, and even eloquent, speaking a coherent if unorthodox mix of French, English, and German, once it was established that we shared these languages in common. Rostropovich showed few signs of his habit since younger years of constantly "gulping vodka," as the critic Tim Page noted, like a "professional athlete might gulp Gatorade."

Thus fueled by vodka, his life was a form of "Perpetual Motion," to cite the title of a work by Paganini, which Rostropovich performs on a valuable new Deutsche Grammophon two-CD set of "Original Masters" reprinting his landmark 1950s recordings. Yet what made Mstislav, or "Slava" as his friends called him, run? Among his obits, only the Agence France-Presse mentioned that Rostropovich's parents were Russian Jews, musicians who traveled to the outpost of Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1925 to teach at the city's new music academy. His father, Leopold — himself a greatly gifted cellist — enjoyed no professional success and died young, leaving an impoverished family to struggle through the war years. Rostropovich's otherwise unexplained trajectory from Jewish roots to a state funeral at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the world's largest Eastern Orthodox Church, may have been sparked by the desire to avoid Russian anti-Semitism. Likewise, his socializing with the mighty, when not on rare occasions criticizing them, may have derived from memories of the roadblocks that impeded his father's career. Mortally ill at his 80th birthday celebrations a month ago, Rostropovich must have perceived the irony of his friend Vladimir Putin — under fire from international human rights organizations for his regime's suppression of dissent and tolerance of racist attacks — straight-facedly praising Rostropovich as a "firm defender of human rights."