Rostropovich, cellist who fought for artistic freedom

By James Kilner

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Mstislav Rostropovich, who died on Friday aged 80, was regarded by many critics as the world's greatest cellist and also became a symbol of the fight for artistic freedom under Communist rule.

While on a European tour in 1978, he and his wife learned of the Kremlin's decision to strip them of Soviet citizenship for what the government newspaper Izvestia called unpatriotic activity.

But in January 1990, in the new climate of Glasnost (openness), Soviet authorities under Mikhail Gorbachev restored the citizenship taken from him and let him return to his homeland.

As well as restoring his citizenship, the Soviet Union also gave him back all the honors he had lost during the rule of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

As Soviet rule collapsed, the cellist was at the barricades among those who defended the government headquarters alongside Russia's first President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow during the abortive putsch staged by Communist party hardliners in 1991.

Yeltsin, Rostropovich's long-time friend and admirer, died on Monday.

Within days of the Berlin Wall coming down, Rostropovich took his cello and flew to Berlin to play an impromptu concert next to the remains of the wall. He said later: "It was a call of the heart."

Two months before his death, President Vladimir Putin awarded Rostropovich a medal for services to the fatherland for his "outstanding contribution to the development of world musical art and many years of creative work".

Even before his exile, the balding, bespectacled musician had already become a celebrity outside the musical world for his defense of cultural freedom in the Soviet Union.

The cellist said in a statement when he learned he had been exiled that he had been robbed of his citizenship "by a stroke of a dictator's pen" because he supported people persecuted in the Soviet Union.

ARTISTIC LIBERTY

He and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, always refused to recognize Moscow's decision and their removal from Soviet cultural records. "We consider ourselves citizens who did nothing against our people ... we remain Russians and Soviet people," he maintained.

Born in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan, on March 27, 1927, Rostropovich showed musical talent as a child. Many famous composers wrote works for him and he received awards worldwide.

A competent pianist and composer in his own right, he decided to concentrate on the cello at an early age. While his career was still in its infancy, he was granted a rare privilege for a Soviet citizen -- the right to travel abroad.

But that privilege did not prevent him from speaking his mind when his friend, novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was attacked in the Soviet press. This immediately got him into trouble, and scheduled tours abroad were suddenly cancelled.