The Magnificent Maestro

All tuned up and ready to blow, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington waited on the stage of the austere concert hall at the John F. Kennedy Center. A cheerful cherub of a man walked swiftly to the podium and smiled at the audience. His face was a pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed unremarked--except that the enraptured man on the podium was the renowned cellist and magnificent maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, the N.S.O.'s new permanent conductor, Washington's grandest new monument.

What was a nice, "serious" musician doing in a piece like this? It was an all-Bernstein program, and the composer had dedicated the overture to Rostropovich by way of acknowledging his arrival in Washington. The music was called Slava!, which is not only the Russian word for glory but Rostropovich's nickname, and it was a good way for the conductor to show Washington that he is as gifted with jazz as he is with Tchaikovsky. Rostropovich caught the spirit easily, bending his body into the music, shafting his cues with a vigorous baton, sculpting the shapes of sound with his left hand, now kneading, now pleading, now punching his fist to bring home a thunderous cluster of dissonance.

Slava had been glorying for two weeks. For his season's opening the week before, he featured Rudolf Serkin in a velvety performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, creating a sensitive orchestral accompaniment to Serkin's ethereal tonalities. For the Bernstein concert, Slava took up his own instrument, while Lenny conducted his Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened by the now familiar spectacle of Rostropovich leaping from his podium to kiss and hug every musician within reach.

Washington is of course used to spectacle, but the era of Rostropovich has no precedent, nor has it ever promised so much. For years the capital's music-lovers have felt ignored. The great performers of the world passed through for one-nighters somewhere en route between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and even downtown Cleveland. But with the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, enterprising managers began to book extended dates for the artists, and today Washington has become one of the obligatory stops for any major musician or musical group that goes on the road.

All this served to stir the audiences, but what Washington still needed desperately was a first-class symphony orchestra of its own. From its earliest days (it was organized in 1930), the N.S.O. had its deficiencies. Some of the musicians were the sort who required 20 minutes to get the spit out of their instruments--and that was just the strings. The first two conductors, Hans Kindler and Howard Mitchell, ran the musical gamut from lackluster to mediocre. In the 1940s, a since forgotten U.S. Senator introduced the group as "the National Sympathy Orchestra." Things finally began to look up when Antal Dorati took over the N.S.O. in 1970. An accomplished musician, Dorati programmed new music, refined the orchestra's sound, gave it a sense of pride. At last, recalls one player, "we began to think of ourselves in terms of a major orchestra."

As Dorati's contract neared an end, the Kennedy Center's executive director, Martin Feinstein, persuaded the N.S.O. to invite Rostropovich in March 1975 to come in as a podium guest. And from the moment the great Russian raised his smiling stick at the long-suffering orchestra, the N.S.O.'s board of directors knew that it had found a truly upbeat conductor. Within weeks, Rostropovich was signed for a two-year contract.

What is so remarkable about Washington's good fortune is that the city has won such an inestimable prize. Slava (hardly anybody calls him Mes-stes-slav) travels on a Soviet passport, but his own country has virtually erased him and his soprano wife Galina Vishnevskaya from Soviet musical life. Reason: Slava dared to challenge the Kremlin's brutal campaign to destroy Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

What the Soviet authorities have denied to their own people Slava brings to the rest of humanity in boundless measure. He is not simply a good conductor.

At 50, he is one of this century's greatest musicians and without doubt the world's finest cellist.

Men of this stature are almost by definition buried in their art--and their egos. But Slava is unique. He has a rage to live--and to give.

He is a dynamo of love. Every stranger is his "deeerest" friend.

He pumps hands endlessly. He kisses musicians, agents, women, children, the cook and the cop and the operators of elevators, trains, phones and planes. He lives, says Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, "in a state of solidified euphoria." To Leonard Bernstein, such enthusiasm can only be defined by the original Greek meaning of the word; Slava, he says, "is possessed by the gods."

The gods smile when he sits down at the cello, and they weep to hear it sound. Boston Symphony Cellist Robert Ripley says that Slava is "absolutely extraordinary." New York's Leonard Rose, who ranks among the world's top half-dozen cellists, calls him "colossal," in a class with the great Pablo Casals, who brought the cello to its peak as a solo instrument.

Only a few of the major composers of the 18th and 19th centuries showed much interest in the solo cello; the result was a paucity of literature. It was Casals who gave the cello its modern voice by enlarging its scope as a solo instrument. This emboldened composers, and the result today is a substantial library of fine cello musk. Casals' technical genius, moreover, virtually revolutionized cello playing. He extended the instrument's physical possibilities, stretching his left hand over the finger board instead of sliding it, and in so doing broadened the range of phrasing, intonation and expression. The outstanding cellists who followed--Emanuel Feuermann, Gregor Piatigorsky, Pierre Fournier, Leonard Rose, Janos Starker--all owe Casals a monumental debt.

In the hands of Rostropovich, the renaissance flowered. New works were written for him by Benjamin Britten, Lukas Foss, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev. In the Soviet Union alone, innumerable compositions were dedicated to him. This burgeoning literature, as well as the example of Rostropovich himself, has encouraged a new generation of fine young cellists, who have moved from deep inside the orchestra to center stage.

Like Casals, Slava is an unabashed romantic. Cradling his Strad between his legs--or, more precisely, embracing it--he seems to pour his Russian soul into every phrase, bowing long, singing lines with a subtle eloquence and a purity of tone. His technique is flawless. Modern composers lay finger-mangling minefields in the thickets of their pieces, but Rostropovich negotiates them with cheerful ease. "I don't even know why my hands do certain things sometimes," he says. "They just grab for the notes." His dynamic range, from the greatest fortissimo down the line to a pianissimo that comes on little cat feet, is nothing short of phenomenal. "You played like a god!" swooned a woman one night in New York. "Yes," replied Slava with a twinkle and a verbal pinch on the cheek, "but like a god with sex?"

Orchestra musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom, then orchestra says, 'There go god with diarrhea.' I, with my work, make service for our most important god--music. I tell them, you not work for me,' I not work for you. We work first for our music, then for our people--for Washington, for America."

Rostropovich has a distinctly colloquial talent for giving instructions to the orchestra. For a crisp pizzicato, he says: "I want hear champagne corks popping." For a soft passage: "Before the sound is coming, smell some bee-oo-tee-fool flowers." For a lyrical passage: "You don't say 'I LOFF YOU!' You whisper [cuddling an imaginary violin] 'I LOFF YOU.' " For a subito forte (to play suddenly loud): "Imagine you with your girl friend. Suddenly your wife come into room. That is subito forte!"

Despite such engaging ways, many musicians and critics complain that Rostropovich takes too many liberties with his music, both at the cello and on the podium. Cellist Starker, whose style is considerably cooler and more disciplined than Slava's, deplores -"the personal approach that disregards the composer and stresses the feelings of the individual." It is not that Rostropovich insists upon sending his disregards to the composer; he simply hears phrases, colors and rhythms that nobody else hears. The result is that when he conducts, his soloist's gift for subtlety sometimes deserts him. In Vienna two years ago, he gave a radically nontraditional performance of that proud Viennese national resource, Die Fledermaus. It was almost predictable that a Russian might fail to exploit the sassy, lighthearted flavor of the classic, and sure enough, Rostropovich's overloaded Bat crashlanded into a nest of snapping critics, who almost declared war on the Soviet Union. Wrote the International Herald Tribune's David Stevens in one of the more merciful reviews: "A Slavic sour cream lay over the proceedings in place of Viennese schlag." In defense, Slava argued that he could easily have conducted a conventional Fledermaus, but had thought it "frivolous" to do so. "Anyway," he added, "who can say what the right tempi are? To whom did Johann Strauss confide what is correct?"

It is an old debating point, and perhaps unresolvable. Admiringly, Conductor Seiji Ozawa says that "Slava I doesn't interpret, he feels. His music is really his character. He is conducting his life." His performances of the Schubert Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano and the Schumann Cello Concerto are typical. The phrasing and pastels of dynamics in the Schubert expose a bold lyricism that would have astonished--but probably pleased--the composer. As for the Schumann, Leonard Bernstein, who recorded the piece with Rostropovich, confesses that he would just as soon not do it again in quite the same fashion. "Slava takes enormous freedoms," says Bernstein. "He does things that one would think would simply destroy the form of the piece. But he makes it work because of the tremendous conviction and love that come over with it. The excesses and exaggerations that he applies have shocked lots of people, but with him they are fantastic." Yehudi Menuhin finds nothing surprising in such an approach. "Rubato is part of Slava's way of being," he explains. "He doesn't have to follow a dry metronomic beat. As a string player, he knows what it is to form a phrase, and this is something that not many conductors know."

The Soviet Union that could not suppress Slava's zestful personality is also responsible for his musical excesses. Soviet teachers have long stressed the old romantic school of Russian music, while ignoring new ideas from Western Europe and the U.S. For Rostropovich, growing up in music was like listening with only one ear--the one that hears passion.

He was born in March 1927 in the Caspian coast city of Baku. His mother Sofia was a pianist, his father Leopold an accomplished but uncelebrated cellist who had studied with Casals in Paris. His older sister Veronica was a fine violinist (and today plays with the Moscow State Philharmonic). "From very young, I heard music in the house," says Slava. He was clearly a prodigy. At age four, he began to play the piano, but when he was eight, he recalls, "my father told me, 'You will play the cello.' "

In 1934 the family moved to Moscow, where the children could better study music. They had no place to live. Penniless, Leopold walked the streets, accosting strangers, asking for help. At length, an Armenian woman took pity on Leopold and invited the family to share her rooms. The flat was tiny. "There was only space to lie down in the beds at night," Slava recalls. "If you have a palace with ten rooms and you give one room to somebody else, it is not such a great thing. But if you have two small rooms for three people and take in four other people, that is incredible. Zinaida Cherchopova keep us for nearly three years and without asking for money. People, simple people! That's why in my heart, all my life I very big grateful to my country."

During World War II, money, food and fuel were scarce. At 13, a year before Leopold would die of a heart attack, Slava began to give concerts out of sheer necessity. He played a child's-size cello and in winter practiced while wearing woolen gloves with the fingertips cut away. At war's end he and his sister entered the Moscow Conservatory. To earn money, he worked in his spare time as a carpenter and framemaker. Between times, he practiced the piano and cello. "I work incredibly hard, sometimes 48 hours not stopping. All my gods became fused into one. I wanted quality from each: sound from Piatigorsky, ideas and personality from Casals, feeling and beauty from Fournier." The hard work paid off. He finished a five-year course in cello in a brisk two years.

It was then that he ran into his first political challenge. In February 1948 Prokofiev and Shostakovich were condemned by the authorities for adhering to "formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies, which are alien to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes." (Translation: the Kremlin could not abide music that it did not understand.) Shostakovich, who was then Slava's composition professor, was thrown out of the conservatory. "For two years, not one piece by them was played in my country," says Slava indignantly. "But I did not change my professors like the other students." In defiance, he left the conservatory and later went to live with Prokofiev. "I was not worried. For me it was such a great honor, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev gave me back great friendship."

Slava gave in equal measure. Once he journeyed to the city of Kurgan to visit Shostakovich in the hospital. When Rostropovich saw that there were "thousands of patients" waiting to be admitted to the 40-bed institution, he decided to build a new wing. "I told all the musicians and musical students in the city, 'Come with me.' " Together they labored until they had completed the structure. "I was working honestly," says Rostropovich today, "not for television cameras or photographers." Best of all, he remembers, was the day when he paused to rub his aching back and, looking up, saw Shostakovich watching him from a window.

By the time he was 30, Rostropovich was already a renowned cellist in the U.S.S.R. and Europe. He won prizes in Prague and Budapest. In the Soviet Union, he would amass the highest honors: the Lenin Prize, two Stalin Prizes and the People's Artist of the U.S.S.R. award.

Once in the early '50s, he saw Galina Vishnevskaya, brilliant prima donna of the Bolshoi Opera.

"My God, such a beauty!" he sighed. Then, at a festival in Prague in May 1955, he saw her again. He invited her for a walk, and four days later married her. Why so impetuous? "It was LOFF!" he cries. "An incredible explosion of LOFF! I was happy that I was alive!"

For a while, the twin-starred musical constellation soared freely in the Soviet firmament. Galina continued to play the top roles at the Bolshoi; Slava conducted and played at home and abroad. They toured together, she singing, he providing superb piano accompaniment. Audiences and students adored them; the Kremlin beamed its good will upon them. They kept a grand apartment in Moscow, and in the village of Zhukovka outside the capital, where good and true Soviet superstars live in uncommon luxury, they had a handsome dacha. Slava constructed a third story for the house, and a cottage and a garage. He built a swimming pool and bought three automobiles (including a Mercedes). He and his wife raised two musically gifted daughters, Olga, a cellist, and Elena, a pianist.

But now came the Solzhenitsyn affair.

Slava and the author had met in the '60s. "At that time," says Rostropovich, "he did not have any problems. Pravda and Izvestiya called him second Tolstoy." When Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and The First Circle were published in the West in 1968, the papers called him "a tool of reactionary Western propaganda." Refused permission to move from Ryazan to Moscow, Solzhenitsyn appealed to Slava. Some friends believe that Rostropovich must have received tacit permission from the authorities to allow Solzhenitsyn to stay at the dacha. In any case, the beleaguered author moved in and remained four years.

They were difficult years. Each foreign plaudit that fell upon Solzhenitsyn was followed by a turn of the Kremlin's screw at the dacha. As Rostropovich tells it, "Official people said I must kick him out. My wife and I did not find that reasonable. We explained our point of view--that each human being has a right to make of his life what he wants." In October 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. When the Soviet press increased its abuse of the author, Rostropovich became enraged and decided to write a letter of protest. Says he: "This was greatest step of my life--the greatest!

With my whole soul I said, 'Now I will not be silent.' " He addressed his letter to four Soviet papers, all of which refused to publish it. But he gave copies to Western newsmen. Referring to the officials who pass upon art in the Soviet Union, Slava asked: "Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word? . . . Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he In knows, what he has personally thought about, experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him."

Solzhenitsyn was eventually exiled. Rostropovich and his wife were punished in other ways. Recalls Slava: "I said to Galina, 'After this you will have many difficulties. If you want, we can have an official divorce.' She said, 'No, absolutely not.' " Without explanation, Galina was given only infrequent assignments at the Bolshoi; when she did appear, her name was left off the printed program. Similarly, when her recordings were played on the radio, her name was omitted from the announcer's list. Says she: "I would listen to myself being obliterated." Slava adds: "It was like a slow-motion plan against us. Step by step. Already, our names could not appear in newspapers. My recordings were not played on the state radio." When he performed with Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, only Richter's name appeared in the next day's reviews. Rostropovich concerts were canceled everywhere. "I request engagements in other countries," says Slava, "and Ministry send telegrams saying, 'Rostropovich ill.' They cancel my television appearances. Why? They say, 'Oh, Rostropovich is not very talented. He is bad cellist.' Suddenly, I do not exist--like a miracle! Now in Belgrade people talking about human rights. But what kind of human rights have you when they just push button and you do not exist? If I go back to Moscow, somebody would come to me in street and say, 'What? You still alive?' "

The worst moments came in the late summer of 1973. Galina and Slava sailed down the Volga to give concerts and recitals in small riverside towns--the only places left to them. But in city after city, they found that the engagements had been canceled or that the posters announced the music without naming them as performers. In despair, Slava wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev: "Please, I have already given up concerts abroad. I only conduct in my own country. Please help me. If this situation is not changed, I will have to give up music in my country."

There was no reply. It was time to get out of the country.

In 1974 Rostropovich was denied permission to participate in a BBC program honoring Shostakovich. In a fury, he told a Western journalist that the Soviet authorities had imposed an "artistic quarantine" on him and Galina.

Friends in the U.S. read that as a cry for help. Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia asked Senator Edward Kennedy to intercede.

Visiting Moscow in April, Kennedy saw Brezhnev and asked him to permit Slava to perform in America. Shortly thereafter, the Rostropovich family was given passports. In 1974 Slava went to Harvard to receive an honorary degree. There he saw Felicia, threw himself to his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. To show his gratitude to the Kennedy family, Rostropovich offered to train their son Teddy in the cello.

As luck would have it, young Teddy is not musical; touched as he was by the gesture, he declined with thanks.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Slava and his family were not expelled from the Soviet Union. They are still on the Kremlin's leash; they are required to renew their passports once a year at a Soviet embassy. But as far as most Russians are concerned, the two are nobodies. Galina's name is nowhere to be found in the Bolshoi Opera's special 200th anniversary commemorative book. Slava's entry in the latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia runs a meager twelve lines. The Soviet press continues to ignore his work abroad, in fear, says Slava, that other musicians might be encouraged to leave the country--or at least to demand greater artistic freedom at home.

Meanwhile, Rostropovich and his family are enjoying their new freedom and fresh celebrity. In addition to the dacha and the Moscow apartment, they keep flats in Paris and New York and one near Lausanne. Olga, 20, and Elena, 19, are studying at Manhattan's Juilliard School. Galina sang Tosca last week at Covent Garden. Friends report that her life with Slava is often tempestuous, partly because his career is rising and hers is fading; after all, Rostropovich was largely responsible for destroying her position at the Bolshoi. While Galina supported her husband's defense of Solzhenitsyn, she feels that Slava's friends sometimes take advantage of him. "He is a man who must be handled with love, yes, but also with brain," she says emphatically. "In music his intuition is never false, but in human relationships he is very often mistaken because he wants to love everybody and not everybody loves him."

If that is so, few people have noticed it, least of all Slava. In many ways, he is a changed man. For one thing, he has discovered money. He has learned that big names are marketable. ("His command of English is not flawless," says a colleague, "but numbers he understands.") He now receives $15,000 for a cello recital, and his N.S.O. salary, though not publicly disclosed, runs upwards of $100,000 a year, which puts him into the top ranks, with the likes of Sir Georg Solti. He is generous with his time and talent. Once he flew from New York to Los Angeles and back in one day to spend a few hours with a sick friend. He donates proceeds of some concerts to charity, eagerly gives benefit performances.

His English remains a performance as well. Once, Slava bounced into the Russian Tea Room, Manhattan's best-known musicians' hangout and, spotting an old friend across the crowded room, released a full-voiced salutation consisting of several raunchy eleven, twelve-and 13-letter cuss words. The room grew silent. The borscht turned pale. "See!" crowed Slava cheerily. "I learn your language!"

Slava rarely practices the cello; he seems always to be warmed up and ready to go. He can run on for days in a row without sleep. Some years ago, during a hectic concert tour, he sat down on a stage to play the Dvorak Cello Concerto and fell asleep during the orchestral introduction. Startled when his cue came, he whispered to the conductor: "You played that so magnificently that I was spellbound. Please start again."

For relaxation, he watches sports on television, collects antiques, reads Russian authors (Maximov, Nekrasov, Sinyavsky) whose works are not published in the Soviet Union. He enjoys the company of fellow exiles, such as Poet Joseph Brodsky and Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. He is a tireless Five-F man, in constant pursuit (in no special order) of Fiddles, Food, Females, Friends--and Fodka. He is a shameless flirt, eats like an orchestra, and puts away more booze than a commissar at a convention. "What I remember first about Slava," says Seiji Ozawa, "is lots of drinking. He taught me how to drink fantastic amounts. After one night with him, the next day is gone." His constant companion is a pocket-size, wire-haired dachshund named Puks. Rostropovich has taught Puks to leap on the piano bench and bang away at the keyboard with his front paws. Friends observe that what is remarkable is not that Puks can play so well, but that he can play at all.

Slava will get ten additional musicians--mainly strings--to bring the N.S.O. to a full complement of 106. He knows that the orchestra has never been top flight, but he is eager to make it so and dreams of the day when he might take it to Moscow to show it off. He is convinced-- long with many of his musicians--that what the orchestra needs most is a massive infusion of confidence.

He has already established an informal open house at his Watergate Hotel suite; any orchestra member may come along with his instrument to play for the conductor or simply to talk about his work. Part of Slava's new look is already visible this season. The musicians now tune up backstage. Then they file into their seats ready to play, sparing the audience the customary din of warm-up noodling.

These are small beginnings, but most observers agree that the N.S.O. never had a better chance to make fine music. It is a notable opportunity for Rostropovich as well. Though he has no intention of giving up the cello, he is determined to make himself a great conductor. "It was my first dream," he says. "If I play cello or piano, I make sound through instruments, but this instrument is not alive. A conductor must make very deep connection, not with instruments but people. He must use not only baton but also eyes, expression and, most important, his musical personality."

He is aware that there is a long march ahead. Says his close friend, Violinist Isaac Stern: "Slava knows that there are certain elements of the classic repertoire that he still has to grow into. He will not pretend that he can match the 30 or 40 years of experience of any master conductor.

He is also much more romantic, much freer in his views than we are in America. But I think a lot of that will change as he begins to work more and more in a completely Western environment. He has everything working in his favor, most of all that he desperately wants to say something and "he is passionate about saying it."

What pleases Slava most is that he has found the chance to express that passion. "At home," he says, "Ministry of Culture make every plan for me. They decide countries and programs I play. Here I am absolutely free. For artists, that is an incredible feeling. At first, I always think I have forget to ask permission from somebody. It is like a sickness."

He yearns to go home, but insists that he will never return unless he is granted the artistic freedom he has found elsewhere. "It is very, very stupid. They think they can change history, but it is not possible for these stupid things to continue for a long time. Americans have this sense of freedom. They say, 'I don't like this! Pfui!' And they make it new! They are free of the presence of history. And in America I am feeling the same way. I am without limit. I make exactly what I want."

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