Exit, con Brio

The Shostakoviches flee

"It is as if someone had returned to me a missing part of my body!" Cellist-Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich exclaimed in Washington. The Russian e migre maestro could be excused the hyperbole. Other Soviet figures have sought artistic freedom in the West, but few could match the poignant symbolism of last week's defection drama. In a stunning rebuff to Kremlin cultural politics, the son and grandson of the Soviet Union's most celebrated contemporary composer the late Dmitri Shostakovich, decided to join Rostropovich in exile and petition the U.S. State Department for asylum.

The ultimate decision to defect was made while Orchestra Conductor Maxim Shostakovich, 42, and his son Dmitri, 19, a concert pianist, were on tour with the U.S.S.R. Television and Radio Symphony Orchestra in West Germany. Though Maxim Shostakovich seemed emotionally strained as he conducted a composition by his father, few if any in the audience the Bavarian city of Fuerth suspected what was afoot. During a post-concert dinner party in a nearby Nuremberg hotel, the Shostakoviches eluded the Soviet functionaries guarding the exits and slipped away to the local police station. There Maxim announced their intention to stay in the West. Later he called his old friend Rostropovich in Washington who in turn informed the State Department of the musicians' desire to come to the U.S.

News of the defection was received with dismayed silence in Moscow, where the name Shostakovich is revered. When an embittered posthumous volume of memoirs came out under the composer's name in the West in 1979, cultural bureaucrats sought to enlist his son in an effort to discredit the book and thus keep the official Shostakovich legend untarnished. Moscow acquaintances suggested that Maxim's frustration with his official role as keeper of his father's flame, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining visas for travel abroad, may have prompted him to take the step his troubled father had always found unthinkable.

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