TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/0226440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 70

Tears and Triumph in Moscow


After 16 years of exile, Rostropovich goes home again


    The first thing Mstislav Rostropovich did in Moscow last
week was go to Novodevichy Cemetery. "To make my tears for my
dearest friends," as he told one interviewer. The great cellist
laid flowers on the grave of Dmitri Shostakovich, who once
taught him composition (Rostropovich quit the Moscow
Conservatory when Shostakovich was dismissed for having offended
Stalin's sensibilities). He laid more at the graves of Sergei
Prokofiev, David Oistrakh and Emil Gilels. The next day, at
another cemetery, he paid his respects to his mother Sofia and
to Andrei Sakharov, whom he called "the greatest man of the
20th century."

    After 16 years of exile, Rostropovich had returned to his
native land -- to give concerts, but more significantly to begin
healing political and personal wounds. The homecoming, said his
wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a former star of the Bolshoi
Theater, "was very emotional."

    "The Soviet Union we left was an island of lies,"
Rostropovich said at a crowded press conference. "Now my country
is cleansing itself of these lies. Wonderful words of freedom
are being spoken. I look forward to the day when these words
become a reality. Then we may live again in our country. We pray
to God that the changes can happen here without bloodshed, that
the people will find their way. When people are happy, when they
have enough food, then they will want nothing but music and joy
. . ."

    Music and joy have always been "Slava" Rostropovich's great
goals, but he is also remarkable for his repeated refusals to
bow down before the Kremlin. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came
under fire for his books on the Soviet Gulag, Rostropovich took
him into his house. He also wrote a letter attacking the censors
who banned Solzhenitsyn's work. "For 48 hours after I wrote that
letter," Rostropovich recalls, "Galina did not sleep but cried.
She told me, `You have the right to destroy yourself, but what
right do you have to destroy my life and the lives of your
daughters?' But after 48 hours, Galina tells me, `Without this
letter, you will not be able to continue living.' We agreed to
send it. I said, `They can't break us.' But she was right. She
said they would break us, and they did. Totally."

    At first the couple were banned from traveling abroad and
from performing in large cities. But then Senator Edward Kennedy
asked Leonid Brezhnev to let them go to the U.S., and they soon
got passports. "For me, at 47, life ended," Rostropovich says.
"I was born anew on May 26, 1974. There was no continuity. I was
truly like a newborn. I couldn't speak the language of the place
I was in. I had no place to live. I had no real friends."

    Invited to take charge of the National Symphony Orchestra
in Washington, Rostropovich began to build a new career. "This
experience has made me emotionally twice as rich," he says. "I
found a great deal more in music than I did when I lived in the
Soviet Union. I re-examined everything, and I could see
everything more vividly. All composers, even Beethoven, came to
mean more."

    When the Soviets invited the National Symphony to make its
first visit to Moscow, they were also inviting a conductor whom
they had stripped of his citizenship in 1978 for "unpatriotic
activity." So the Supreme Soviet last month voted to restore
that citizenship. Rostropovich considered delaying his return
until Solzhenitsyn was similarly exonerated. When he recently
visited Solzhenitsyn in Cavendish, Vt., the novelist said he
would not return until all his books were available in the
Soviet Union. Even Rostropovich cannot consider a permanent
return yet. He has concert commitments for at least two years,
and also two American grandchildren, "so my first goal will be
to go back on occasion and to help start building bridges."

    The Moscow Conservatory's yellow-and-white Great Hall was
packed with notables, ranging from Raisa Gorbachev to Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, when Rostropovich came striding out on stage, threw
kisses in all directions and then raised his arms to begin. He
had chosen a program full of sad messages: first Samuel Barber's
elegiac Adagio for Strings; then Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique"
Symphony, which Rostropovich had performed at his last Moscow
concert 16 years ago; then Shostakovich's anguished Fifth
Symphony, written at the height of Stalin's purges in 1937. (In
three subsequent concerts, two of them in Leningrad,
Rostropovich would also perform the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony,
the Dvorak Cello Concerto and Stephen Albert's Rivering Waters.)

    He conducted very much in what Washingtonians know as the
Rostropovich style: wild flailing of the arms, much tossing of
the silvery head, impassioned appeals for more emotion. The
audience responded with a standing ovation, rhythmic clapping,
showers of carnations. For his fourth encore, Rostropovich burst
out with a rousing salute to his new homeland, John Philip
Sousa's red, white and blue chestnut, Stars and Stripes Forever.
The audience -- including Raisa Gorbachev -- gave one last
standing ovation. At a reception afterward at the U.S.
Ambassador's residence, Rostropovich greeted friends with kisses
and bear hugs and vodka toasts. Asked how he had chosen Stars
and Stripes Forever, he grinned and said, "From the heart."


By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Barry
Hillenbrand/Tokyo.