Cellist's Poignant Politics Rostropovich finally reconciled with his
   home country

   Octavio Roca, San Francisco Chronicle

   Sunday, January 3, 1999

   Music and politics should not have to mix, but they do.  And they do
   so with poignant insistence in the case of Mstislav Rostropovich,
   the great cellist and conductor who is equally celebrated for his
   championing of human rights.

   Even Rostropovich's recent whirlwind American tour, designed to be
   anything but political, could not take the musician's thoughts away
   from politics.  The beginning of the tour, a Dvorak and Haydn concerto
   program conducted by Rostropovich's old friend Zdenek Makal at the
   New Jersey Performing Arts Center, coincided with the burial in St.
   Petersburg of the slain Galina Starovoitova.

   "She was a great, simple and honest woman," Rostropovich said of the
   assassinated Russian legislator, who was known for her courageous
   defense of democratic values against extremists and opportunists across
   the political spectrum.  "And she was my friend.  Like me, like Boris
   Yeltsin, like many of us, she believed in Russia's possibilities after
   so many years of terror and sadness."

   UNSETTLING NEWS

   The day before Rostropovich's arrival in San Francisco for his
   December 12 concert at Davies Hall with Michael Tilson Thomas and
   the San Francisco Symphony, unsettling news from Russia again intruded
   on thoughts of pure music.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn publicly rebuffed
   President Yeltsin and re fused the Order of St.  Andrew, Russia's
   highest cultural award, which the beleaguered Russian head of state
   tried to bestow on Russia's greatest living writer on his 80th
   birthday.  Chatting over afternoon tea backstage at Davies, Rostropovich
   became solemn as he discussed Solzhenitsyn's decision.  His usually
   sunny countenance darkened briefly as he spoke -- in English, a tad
   disused since his departure from Washington's National Symphony, and
   alternately in French -- and the man, who at 71 acts impossibly young
   and looks like a big and very wise baby, suddenly showed his age.

   LOVE OF COUNTRY

   "I stayed up all night on the phone trying to convince Solzhenitsyn not
   to do this," said Rostropovich, who once saved the writer's life and
   gave him shelter during some of the worst years of artistic repression
   under Soviet Communist rule. "I respect him, but I believe he is wrong
   to refuse. This is a difficult time for Russia and for Russian artists:
   After so many years where nothing seemed possible, suddenly everything
   is possible, and many do not know what to do. One thing we must do is
   love our country, and no matter what I or anyone else think of Yeltsin,
   he is our president and Russia is our country. To refuse this honor is
   to insult Russia."

   These are difficult, disturbing matters. That the preoccupations
   of Rostropovich the patriot had no effect on the concentration and
   incandescent genius of Rostropovich the musician was clear from the
   performance at Davies later that night. The raw vitality of the opening
   cello outburst of the Dvorak concerto, the irrepressible rhythmic
   freedom of Rostropovich's phrasing, the sweetness and sheer vocal
   splendor of the adagio, the unashamed devotion and passion of the
   finale: Here was romantic music at its best, necessary, utterly
   beautiful, complete.

   Here also was an artist divided, as he has been forced to be most of
   his life.  "Someday," he said after an invigorating rehearsal with
   the San Francisco Symphony, "music will be just music.  Maybe this
   is even happening with Shostakovich," he added, proudly pointing to
   the spectacular popular success of his Shostakovich Festival in London
   earlier this year, a feat he hopes to duplicate in other cities from
   Chicago to Moscow.  "Too many lies were told by a government of liars,
   and too many of those lies made their way into what people heard in
   Shostakovich's music.  You know how we have had to defend his symphonies
   as not being an apology for Stalin, as not being a compromise, as
   not so many things.  Music is part of history, and our history has
   lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.  But maybe
   soon, maybe finally we can feel free just to love music."

   STRIPPED OF CITIZENSHIP

   A stubborn refusal to betray great music and true friendships was
   the reason Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, lost their
   country in 1978, when the Soviet government stripped them of their
   citizenship and erased their names from the music history books.

   That took some doing.  Rostropovich was spotted for his brilliance
   almost simultaneously with his being branded troublesome.  When the
   infamous 1948 denunciations of Shostakovich and Prokofiev struck
   terror among Russian artists, the young Rostropovich moved in with
   Prokofiev and continued his studies with Shostakovich.  From then
   until his exile in 1974, Rostropovich juggled his country's highest
   honors -- he was a People's Artist, a recipient of the Lenin and
   Stalin prizes -- with bouts of visa refusals, public humiliations
   and both subtle and blunt official intimidation.  Foreign distinctions
   followed:  He became a Commander of the British Empire as well as of
   France's Legion of Honor; in the United States, he received both a
   Kennedy Center Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
   Rostropovich's return to Russia with Vishnevskaya in 1990, on their
   own terms, to a homeland that was changing faster than anyone could
   ever have expected, was one of the key cultural events of the glasnost
   era.

   A HOMECOMING PILGRIMAGE

   On that 1990 homecoming, Rostropovich's first gesture after landing
   in Moscow was to leave behind the welcoming crowds and rush to
   Shostakovich's grave.  These days, there is another place that claims
   his affection at least as strongly, Moscow's new Christ Cathedral.
   New, because it stands miraculously where only three years ago there
   was a huge outdoor swimming pool, a blight on the landscape by the
   Moscow River where once Moscow's largest church had stood before
   Stalin dynamited it to oblivion.

   "I have a place to pray there," said Rostropovich, proudly and
   uncharacteristically telling how his name is the first engraved in a
   plaque inside the church that has become a symbol of hope for Russians
   after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Rostropovich, usually with little
   or no fanfare, has contributed the better part of his considerable
   earnings to such varied causes as AIDS prevention programs in Russia,
   the restoration of the venerable Moscow Conservatory and the
   preservation of Russia's string tradition; the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya
   Foundation so far has raised and sent more than $5 million in medicine,
   food and equipment to those in need.  But the rebuilding of Christ
   Cathedral was a major concern to which he devoted many benefit concerts,
   and "that beautiful church is where I first go whenever I land in Moscow
   now.  There, I feel at home." Even as he acknowledges his country's
   mounting troubles, Rostropovich now seems at peace.  He has given up his
   apartment at the Watergate in Washington, but he and his wife still
   maintain houses in Paris and London in addition to Moscow and, most
   recently, St.  Petersburg, where the Rostropovich- Vishnevskaya Musical
   Archives will be established.

   "Of course, I still live wherever I am rehearsing and wherever I am
   playing," he said.  This observation, tinged with melancholy, was
   the bass note under many conversations we have had in the past --
   many times over tea backstage at the Kennedy Center or the Barbican,
   over vodka in Moscow, introducing me to kasha at breakfast in the
   Watergate or being introduced to rum coco-locos at the Casals Festival
   in San Juan.  This time is different.  This time there is no sadness
   in Rostropovich's description of his dizzying schedule.  "I am booked
   completely until the year 2001, and I am adding dates," he said.  He
   confirmed that he has turned down, not for the first time, an offer
   to become director of the Bolshoi Theater:  "I would have to give up
   playing the cello, and I cannot do that."

   NO LONGER HOMESICK

   "I also can't take a vacation," he added.  "I think at my age I may
   as well wait until the very big vacation that is coming soon enough."
   This actually is life on the road as usual, but it is a life that
   once made him terribly homesick.  Not now.

   "I know I have a home, and I know I can return home," Rostropovich
   said with a broad smile.  "I no longer feel like an exile.  That
   makes all the difference."

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