Mstislav Rostropovich was born on March 27, 1927 in Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan. He came from a family of musicians; his father and grandfather were cellists and his mother was a pianist. He started playing the piano when he was four and began to train formally with the cello at age eight. His family moved to Moscow in 1934 to allow the children the best opportunity for musical education. Due to the death of his father, Rostropovich, at age 14, became a professional musician and music teacher in order to support his mother and sister. Many of his students were twice his age. In a 1977 interview Rostropovich credited his early forced maturation as the impetus to his drive as a professional cellist.
At the end of World War II Rostropovich entered the Moscow Conservatory, completing in two years a five-year course of instruction in the cello. He continued studying under Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich even after they were denounced in 1948 by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee. In 1955 he married Galina Vishnevskaya, a Bolshoi opera soprano, and toured extensively as her accompanist. In 1969 Rostropovich allowed his friend and dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn to move into his country house. With his public defense of Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich started receiving a repressive backlash from the Soviet government; appearances and tours started being cancelled and his name vanished from publications and newspapers. In May 1974, Rostropovich and his family were allowed to leave the Soviet Union for the United States upon the personal request of Senator Edward Kennedy. In 1978 Rostropovich and his wife were stripped of their Soviet citizenship.
His career was revitalized once he was established in the United States. His first American performance was as a guest conductor with the National Symphony Orchestra in 1975. His considerable income from recordings and performances allowed Rostropovich to donate to various charities and campaign for artistic freedom. As a result of his triumphant return to the Soviet Union in 1990 the Soviet government restored both his and his wife’s citizenship.
Rostropovich was considered the greatest cellist since Pablo Casals. John von Rheim, a Chicago Tribune music critic, said “No cellist commands so extensive a tonal range, from a sonorous throb to a ferocious rasp to the most delicate, bell-like harmonics.” (Contemporary Musicians) He has received over 60 awards from 18 countries. Among his many awards were the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom (1987) and knighthood in the same year by Queen Elizabeth II. He has also been granted honorary doctorates from over 30 universities, both here and abroad.
On his 80th birthday celebration in Moscow he was presented with the Order of Service medal by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rostropovich died of cancer on April 27, 2007 in a Moscow hospital.
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