Another Beautiful Light Goes Out

It is a sad day in the world of music-lovers because the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich died today. He was 80 and had been fighting cancer for a very long time but it is sad when such a great and shining light goes out. He leaves behind a body of work that anyone would be proud to claim. While exiled in the U.S. he was the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. But it is the sound of his cello, his passionate, fierce, fiery bowing, that the world will miss most. Thank heavens for CDs. Thank goodness we live in a time when the work of such artists cam be preserved.

Rostropovich was a man of great charm and sweetness who grew up in a musical family. His father, also a cellist, studied with Pablo Casals, and Rostopovich himself studied with Dmitri Shostakovich. Just typing those names gives me a shiver. Such great lights in the musical world!

One of the wonderful stories that Rostopovich liked to tell was about his mother. Rostopovich was not a handsome man by any means and he said that he asked his mother, who had carried him for 10 months, why, since she had carried him for an extra month, she didn’t give him a more handsome face. She replied, “Because I was busy giving you beautiful hands.” What a lovely thought.

Rostopovich played like a mad genius at times. One fellow musician described him as a roaring inferno when he played. His nature as a man was both sweet and fierce. It was his outspoken support of the Soviet dissidents that earned him a 20 year exile in the United States — particularly his support of exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn whom he took into his home for 4 years while he worked to persuade his government that artists were required to speak out against injustice — that it is their work.

I was going to write today about Ulysses S. Grant whose birthday it is today. Everyone knows that Grant was a great soldier and a not-so-great President but what many do not know is that he was also a very fine writer. His Personal Memoirs is possibly the best memoir from a literary standpoint ever written by a U.S. President. And, like many writers, Grant had a bad time with his publisher. He left the presidency broke and ill and, even though he wrote a wonderful first chapter, his publisher was stingy and paid a pittance. Grant was discouraged. It was writer Mark Twain who came to his rescue and offered to publish the book and pay him a significant royalty. Grant, suffering from cancer, too, and in great pain, wrote his memoir and Twain paid him close to a half a million dollars in royalties — the largest royalty ever paid for a book at that time.

Rostopovich once said that he didn’t believe Bach and Beethoven were dead. He said when he listened to and played their music he was sure that they lived somewhere only in a different form. I think that when I read great writers — that their souls live on in their books. I cannot imagine that anyone who reads great writing, listens to great music, or spends time with great art can do other than think the same.

It is my belief that artistic creativity is a sublime and sacred thing. And the fact that artists support one another — as Rostopovich supported Solzhenitsyn and Twain supported Grant — makes me think that somewhere in the nature of artists there is an imperative that art comes before all.

So, adieu Maestro Rostopovich. Thank you for your music and your passion. It lives on.

Thanks for reading.