Tears And Triumph in Moscow

By Otto Friedrich

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."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Barry Hillenbrand/Tokyo