Word: rostropovich
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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...
...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...
...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...