主题：[纪念]Rostropovich去世

Mstislav Rostropovich, Cellist and Conductor, Dies

By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: April 27, 2007
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.

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 P鋜t, 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-Sa雗s 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.

Mr. Rostropovich was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington from 1977 to 1994 and remained close to it as its Conductor Laureate. He also had strong relationships with several of the world’s great orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

Tall, heavyset and bald but for a halo of white hair, Mr. Rostropovich was a commanding presence both on and off the stage. But he was also gregarious in an extroverted, Russian way. At the end of an orchestral performance, he often hopped off the podium and kissed and hugged every musician within reach.

He had a sense of humor that often cut through the sobriety of the concert atmosphere. He sometimes surprised his accompanists by pasting centerfolds from adult magazines into the scores from which they would be performing. At the San Francisco Symphony’s 70th birthday tribute to Isaac Stern, he played “The Swan” movement from Saint-Sa雗s’s “Carnival of the Animals” attired in white tights, a ballet tutu, a swan-like headdress and red lipstick.

Last year, Mr. Rostropovich announced that he would stop playing the cello publicly, but his conducting remained as vigorous as ever. His schedule included commemorations of the Shostakovich centenary in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Moscow and Tokyo.

In an interview in The New York Times last year, Mr. Rostropovich said of Shostakovich, “He was the most important man in my life, after my father.” He added: “Sometimes when I’m conducting, I see his face coming to me. Sometimes it’s not really a happy face — I conduct maybe a bit too slow. So I conduct faster, and the face disappears.”

Mr. Rostropovich always said that one of the principal lures of the podium was that the orchestral repertory seemed so vast when compared with the cello repertory. But he did not confine himself to the classics. He commissioned regularly, and led the premieres of more than 50 works. Two pieces written for him during his National Symphony years — Stephen Albert’s “Riverrun” Symphony and Morton Gould’s “Stringmusic” — won Pulitzer Prizes. Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Druckman, Richard Wernick, Gunther Schuller and Ezra Laderman were among the other composers who wrote for him or whose works had their world premieres under his baton.

Mr. Rostropovich, who was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian), was also an accomplished pianist. He was often the accompanist at recitals by his wife, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, whom he married in 1955, and who survives him, as do two daughters, Olga and Elena.

Mr. Rostropovich became famous beyond musical circles as a symbol of artistic conscience and his defiance of the Soviet regime. When Mr. Solzhenitsyn came under attack by Soviet authorities in the late 1960’s, Mr. Rostropovich and Miss Vishnevskaya allowed him to stay in their dacha at Zhukovka, outside Moscow. He was their guest for four years, and Mr. Rostropovich tried to intercede on his behalf, personally taking the manuscript of “August 1914” to the Ministry of Culture and arguing that there was nothing threatening to the Soviet system in it. His efforts were rebuffed.

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Mr. Rostropovich’s own troubles began in 1970 when, out of frustration with the suppression of writers, artists and musicians, he sent an open letter to Pravda, the state-run newspaper, which did not publish it. Western newspapers did.

“Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word,” he asked in the letter. “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.”

After the letter was published, Mr. Rostropovich and Miss Vishnevskaya were unable to travel abroad and faced dwindling engagements at home. Occasionally, it would seem that the ban was lifted. In 1971, Mr. Rostropovich conducted and Miss Vishnevskaya sang in Bolshoi Opera performances of Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” in Vienna, and Mr. Rostropovich was allowed to travel to the United States for concerts. But the next year, scheduled appearances in Austria and Britain were canceled without explanation.

It was not until 1974 that they were allowed out of the country again. That year they were given two-year travel visas. In the West, Mr. Rostropovich told interviewers that he missed Russia and longed to return but that he would not do so until artists were free to speak their minds.

“I will not utter one single lie in order to return,” he said in 1977. “And once there, if I see new injustice, I will speak out four times more loudly than before.”

The Soviet Government’s response was to revoke his and Miss Vishnevskaya’s citizenship in 1978. Thereafter they traveled on special Swiss documents.

But they outlived the Soviet system. With Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of increased openness, Mr. Rostropovich began to renew his contacts with his homeland. He met with Mr. Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1987. In November 1989, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he gave an impromptu concert there.

Mr. Rostropovich’s Soviet citizenship was restored in January 1990. The next month, he took the National Symphony to Moscow and what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The event was the subject of a television documentary, “Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia” released on video in 1992.

In 1991, when Communist hard-liners tried to topple the more open regime, Mr. Rostropovich went to Moscow to stand beside Mr. Yeltsin. Two years later, during the siege of the Russian White House, Mr. Rostropovich, who was touring Russia again with the National Symphony, gave a free concert in Red Square, attended by 100,000 people. Originally planned as a gesture to music lovers who were unable to attend the indoor concerts, the performance was transformed into a show of support for democratization.

“Russians need to be reminded at times like this that they are a great people,” he told a Times reporter at the time. “Events disrupt things a little sometimes, but listening to this music is a reminder that there’s a great nation here.” Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, on March 27, 1927, to Leopold Rostropovich and Sofiya Nikolaevna Fedotov, both musicians. His mother began teaching him the piano when he was four. When he was eight, he went to Paris to study the cello with his father, who had been a student of Pablo Casals. In the mid-1930’s, the family moved to Moscow, where young Mstislav entered the Gnesin Institute. He made his debut at age 13, playing a Saint-Sa雗s Concerto in Slavyansk, Ukraine, and in 1943, when he was 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory as a student of Semyon Kozolupov.

He also studied composition with Shostakovich, and continued to do so even after the Soviet authorities condemned both Shostakovich and Prokofiev for “formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies.” He later studied composition privately with Prokofiev, and although Mr. Rostropovich’s compositions are not well known, they include two piano concertos, a string quartet and several solo piano works.

By the late 1940’s, he had won competitions in Moscow and, in his first trips outside the Soviet Union, in Prague and Budapest. He toured widely during the 1950’s, and in 1956 — the year he was appointed to a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory — he made his American debut at Carnegie Hall with a recital program that included sonatas by Brahms, Shostakovich and Bach and as the soloist in the Prokofiev Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos.

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Mr. Rostropovich was fond of concerto marathons. In an eight-concert series with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1967, he played 30 works by 24 composers. In New York, in 1987, celebrating his 60th birthday, he gave five concerts with three orchestras — the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony and the National Symphony — playing 15 cello concertos and conducting a handful of symphonies, as well as the Britten “War Requiem.” As a bonus, he performed Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. That year, President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, this country’s highest civilian honor.

Rostropovich made his conducting debut in 1968, when he led a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Bolshoi. He made his British conducting debut with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in 1974. His first American conducting performances were with the National Symphony and the San Francisco Opera in 1975.

“I never studied, but I had the best teachers,” he said of his new career in 1975. “I played with the best conductors of the world.”

In 1977, Mr. Rostropovich accepted the directorship of the National Symphony Orchestra, succeeding Antal Dorati. For one of his first concerts, Leonard Bernstein wrote “Slava!” a festive overture that captured the ebullience of Mr. Rostropovich’s style. And although critics complained at first that his repertory was unduly conservative, he threw himself into contemporary works, including many composed for him and his orchestra.

During his tenure, he made significant improvements in the orchestra’s sound and cohesiveness, partly by reseating the strings — he moved the violas to the outside and the cellists to the center, to create a richer blend — but also by systematically upgrading the roster. He also brought the orchestra into the world spotlight, taking it on its first tours of Europe, Asia and Russia, conducting it regularly at Carnegie Hall, and making many recordings with it.

The most frequent criticism of Mr. Rostropovich as a conductor was that he sometimes became so carried away with the music that he let the performance get out of his control. Mr. Rostropovich objected to this analysis.

“When I go to a rehearsal,” he told The Times in 1985, “I have already a model in my mind for the sound of a piece, for the shape of the interpretation. Maybe I’m wrong, but if there are no special acoustical problems in the hall, I produce exactly what I want. If there is a choice, I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.”

For several years, Mr. Rostropovich was a director of Benjamin Britten’s summer festival at Aldeburgh, England, and for a few seasons beginning in 1983, he had his own festival nearby, in Snape.

In addition to conducting, he continued to pursue anactive recital and concerto career as a cellist. His instrument was the 1711 “Duport” Stradivarius, which he had fitted out with a special bent tailpin, to make the angle at which the cello is held more comfortable.

He also continued to make superb recordings of the great cello works. Yet it was not until 1991, when he was 63, that he decided to record all six of the Bach Suites, a set he considered the crowning glory of the instrument’s literature. He chose the site for the project, the Basilique Sainte-Madeleine, in the Burgundian village of Váezelay, France, because he considered the church’s acoustics perfect and the simplicity of its architecture inspiring. He produced and edited the recordings himself and paid for the sessions so that if he were dissatisfied, he would be free to destroy the tapes. As it turned out, he was pleased with the results, which were released on CD and video in 1995.

Mr. Rostropovich frequently presided over cello master classes, and in 1997 he began offering a regular series of such classes, as well as performances, in his hometown, Baku, Azerbaijan. In 2004, the house in Baku where the Rostropovich family lived from 1925 to 1931 was opened as the Leopold and Mstislav Rostrovich Home-Museum.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company