Msitslav Rostropovitch Par/by Norman Lebrecht & Louise F. Samson
/ June 14, 2007
Norman Lebrecht
Not many musicians are laid to
rest opposite their head of state, but Mstislav Rostropovich earned
his plot at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, across the central path
from Boris Yeltsin. Not that the two men were natural companions. What
joined them in history was one of the cellist’s spontaneous inspirations
– his rush to an airport in August 1991 to fly out and play at Yeltsin’s
side outside the Russia Parliament in the face of growling tanks, leading
the nation’s resistance to a communist counter-coup. He had done much
the same two years previously when the Berlin Wall burst open, playing
Bach for hours in fresh rubble before he was spotted by photographers
and snapped as an icon.
Slava, to those who knew him, was
always more than a musician. He was a sensor of his times and a moral
guardian, a hero who acted on impulse for the good of mankind. I saw
him first the morning he was stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1978,
hounded over his support for the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ‘How
can they take away my birthright?’ he cried, sobbing helplessly before
the world’s cameras. A cynical press man asked whether he hadn’t
expected official retaliation for his dissidence. Slava stared back
uncomprehendingly, lost for words. It was not in his nature to calculate
the consequences of the right thing to do.
He had never met Solzhenitsyn when
in October 1969, hearing he had been driven from his home and was sick
with cancer, he offered the Nobel Prize winner the use of a service
flat at his dacha. Within days, Slava was denounced as an enemy of the
people. This came as a surprise to a musician who had played the system
pretty much as he pleased, beguiling the bureaucracy with foreign gifts
and the hard currency he earned. ‘He was the only one who took the
Soviets on and got away with it,’ says the London impresario Victor
Hochhauser. When Benjamin Britten, asked by Slava for a new work, said,
‘won’t you have to get permission to play it?’, the cellist replied:
‘I ask no-one.’
He might have got away with it
again had he not written a pro-Solzhenitsyn letter to Pravda which,
unpublished, got printed abroad. The Kremlin cracked down and Slava
endured a travel ban until, on appeals from Edward Heath and Edward
Kennedy in 1974, he was allowed out. Four years later, his citizenship
was revoked. I remember his face that day in mourning, the eyes welling
behind owlish specs, his soprano wife Galina stony-faced, as if they
had lost the dearest thing on earth.
Mourning did not become Slava.
His habit was to clunk a magnum of champagne on the table as a prelude
to conversation, the beam on his face stretching wider than Cheshire,
each new acquaintance a lifelong friend. ‘God give me a little bit
more blessing than others,’ he told me once in his Russified English,
‘not for cello playing, but for friendship.’ At his 60th birthday
party in Washington DC, where he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra
for 17 years, I stood in the reception line between Gregory Peck and
a blue-collar plumber. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked them.
‘Friend of Slava’s,’ said the Hollywood legend. ‘Friend of Slava’s,’
said the plumber.
His friends were there when needed.
For his first year of exile he lived with Galina and their two daughters
at the Hochhausers’ home in Holland Park. At the hosts’ Sabbath
table, he hummed along with Hebrew hymns and transposed them later for
cello. By lineage and faith he was wholly Russian and Orthodox, with
a sentimental attachment to Armenia, his accidental birthplace.
For a man so driven by idealism
and emotion, he was shrewd as an actuary when it came to money and sometimes
downright greedy. He was the highest paid soloist of his day, at $45,000
a night, and among the top conductors. He loved property and bought
homes in Paris, Lausanne and London (later also in Moscow and St Petersburg),
starting with a flat in Holloway and trading up to half a house in Maida
Vale. Since he was never in the same town two weeks running, he made
new friends in the street to do his house-sitting.
He was not prudent in his friendships,
collecting such monsters as the oil tycoon Armand Hammer, and his support
for Yeltsin’s presidency ran into justifying his Chechnya war. Once,
bombing down a French autoroute, he told me how the wicked Chechens
had hired Olympic marksmen to ping Russian soldiers in the leg, before
wiping out the medics who came to treat them. It was the kind of propaganda
that belonged to the raped Belgian nuns of the First World War, but
Slava swallowed Yeltsin’s fables and stared down my scepticism. We
were heading for Vezelay, a medieval village where he chose to record
the Bach suites charmed, he said, by the acoustic of the church –
more likely, I thought, by the village’s triple-starred restaurant.
Either way, it was hard to imagine a happier man at his work.
Good food, copious drink and extremely
bad jokes were as much a part of Slava as the gigantic tone he drew
from the cello. He read widely, indiscriminately, and was curious to
the last, though depressed by recent events and failing health. He had
ended a long relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra, one of
his favourite bands, over its announcement of Valery Gergiev as chief
conductor. ‘I don’t want to speak,’ he said, when I called some
months ago, ‘I am too sad.’
That is not, however, how he will
be remembered. As a cellist, he inspired more new works – around 270
– than any soloist in history; as a conductor he commanded respect
despite vagaries of beat; and as a public figure he followed his heart.
When he played Bach for us at Sainte-Madeleine in Vezelay, even the
gargoyles smiled.
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article, please email mikevincent at scena dot org
Louise F. Samson
J’ai d’extraordinaires souvenirs
de mes rencontres avec ce musicien unique, cet homme complètement hors
du commun. Mon premier contact avec lui fut téléphonique : « Allô
!… Je suis Rostropovitch… Je suis violoncelliste ! Je peut-être
au bon numéro pour trouver Martha Argerich ? » C’est dans ce français
à la syntaxe et à l’accent « à la russe » que débuta une relation
magnifique…et passionnante.
J’ai eu le privilège de passer
plusieurs soirées avec cet immense musicien que je rencontrai pour
la première fois lors de mes débuts au Festival de Lanaudière. Le
concerto de Dvo?ák sous son archet de velours fut à la hauteur de
la spiritualité et de la beauté du site. Une communion d'âmes
était née.
C’est avec enthousiasme qu’il
accepta l’invitation de venir jouer pour les mélomanes du Club musical
de Québec. La puissance de l’art de « Rostro » et une série d’événements
tous plus drôles qu’imprévus rendirent cette visite inoubliable.
Son arrivée au Grand Théâtre
se fait sous une pluie torrentielle. Je m’empresse de réquisitionner
une personne assise dans l’entrée, et son parapluie, afin qu’elle
m’accompagne à la voiture. Imaginez la scène : la belle pianiste
Francine Chabot avec son parapluie, reconnaissant bien sûr le grand
violoncelliste, l'écoutant raconter avec mille détails (la pluie ?
on s’en fiche !) à sa « Louisoschka » - moi ! - ses débuts de ballerine,
la veille à Los Angeles à la fête de 70e anniversaire
de Isaac Stern. Rostropovitch en collant, tutu et pointes … Ce digne
émule de Pavlova dansant Le Cygne ! Il est ravi que les
journaux aient fait si grand état de sa prestation. Son enthousiasme
est contagieux. Nous sommes là, debout sous la pluie, à parcourir
avec lui l'article du Los Angeles Times. À écouter, à rire. Francine
a tenu le parapluie pendant au moins dix minutes !
Les discussions musicales dans
lesquelles il m’entraîne pendant son séjour sont toujours passionnantes
et inépuisables. Moi qui suis une violoncelliste frustrée mais
qui adore et connais bien le répertoire de ce si bel instrument, je
fais de la boulimie avec lui. Il me traite en «collègue », il
m'appelle Louisoschka ! Nous discutons entre autres de cette magnifique
5e sonate de Beethoven qu’il interprétera le soir avec
son pianiste Lambert Orkis. Le dernier mouvement de cette oeuvre est
une fugue diabolique comme seul Beethoven savait en écrire : atonale,
arythmique et extrêmement périlleuse. Si l'un des interprètes commet
une erreur, il est quasi impossible pour lui de reprendre pied.
Le concert commence. Le premier
mouvement de la sonate est magnifique; le deuxième, sublime,
bouleversant. Arrive la fugue: entrée du piano, entrée du violoncelle,
puis le piano revient mais… pas le violoncelle !!! Rostropovitch
saute un temps, espérant rattraper le piano. Mais c'est raté … En
désespoir de cause, le piano se met à la recherche du violoncelle
et bien sûr, c’est la catastrophe ! Du vrai Schœnberg!!! Mais une
catastrophe magnifique, jouée avec passion, conviction et panache si
bien que la majorité du public n’y voit que du feu! Arrivant
en coulisse, avec tout le sérieux d’un banquier suisse, il me dit :
« Et voilà… j’avais oublié de te dire… je viens de publier une
nouvelle édition des sonates de Beethoven et j’ en avais réservé
la première pour Québec! J’espère que tu as apprécié» ! Jamais
désarçonné, le grand Rostro !
Le reste du récital fut un voyage
céleste.
Il y aurait tant d’autres moments
magnifiques à rappeler. Quel gigantesque privilège de les avoir partagés
avec lui ! Bien sûr, on a rigolé. Mais ce qui me reste de plus précieux,
bien capitonné dans ma boîte à souvenirs, ce sont les heures d’échanges
musicaux, les conversations sur la vie, la politique, l’Union soviétique,
qui fut si cruelle envers lui. Rostropovitch avait un amour indéfectible
de la vie et sa foi dans la beauté de l’être humain était sans
faille. J'ai du mal à croire qu'il m'a été donné d'être accueillie
dans ce foyer d'inépuisable passion qui a marqué toute sa vie. Avec
lui disparaît un monument de notre ère musicale. Bien d’autres l’ont
écrit, moi je m'en désole profondément.
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