Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello

Our life not so easy. Cello heavy instrument,

and our travels, especially with aircraft

give to us many difficulties.

That's why we suffer more than violin player or flute player.

But because we suffer, we is beautiful.

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto No 2" by Shostakovich

Over the last 50 years, the cello has enjoyed a revolution,

brought about by one man from Russia.

His name was Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich.

For me he was the greatest cellist not only of the century

but possibly ever.

Changed my life, you know?

I think, maybe because of him, I think I believe in God.

What he did was completely change people's perceptions

of what was possible on the cello.

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto" by Edward Elgar

The 20th century was rich in outstanding cello players.

In Britain, there was Jacqueline du Pre...

..in France, Paul Tortelier and Pierre Fournier...

in America the Chinese cellist Yo-Yo Ma

and the Russian Gregor Piatigorsky.

And before them all the legendary Catalan player, Pablo Casals,

father of the modern instrument.

All of them have touched the hearts of music lovers with the beauty

and fire of their playing.

But Rostropovich - Slava as he was known - went further.

He set out to expand the cello's repertoire,

to change the way it was played...

..and to make it at least the equal of the piano or the violin.

I must tell you we drink alcohol much better than violinists or pianists.

What set Rostropovich apart were the risks he took in his life

and his music, and his irresistible personality.

Newly-discovered film of his collaboration with Benjamin Britten

shows Rostropovich's cello as the instrument of choice for composers.

It had the firepower to hold its own against the full symphony orchestra.

Ahhh...

So magnetic was this man and his music-making, that he moved

the cello on to the world stage and changed its status for good.

If you turn on the radio, do you always know whether

it's him playing?

-Yes, absolutely.

-Of course.

Yes. I think most of the time, yes.

I don't know how.

How?

The sound, the sound. Nobody has a sound like that.

It's a big, burnished, bronzed sound -

not especially dark, quite warm.

From the almost first notes, the moment I hear

the recording on the radio, I know that's my father who's playing.

It's not cello. I mean, it's a voice.

It's like, you know, a voice that you remember,

a Ferrier or a Janet Baker.

It has a character which is immediately recognisable.

His instrument was for him not an instrument that you play,

it was just a way of expression.

And he was a very, very colourful person.

When he played, he was speaking. Cello was his voice,

and I could recognise the voice of my father so...

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto No 1" by Shostakovich

I'm not sure that there's ever been a cellist like it.

The spectrum of the sort of sounds he makes, and going from the...

He can play more quietly than anybody in the world

and he just makes an entire concert hall practically stop breathing.

To being unbelievably powerful or savage or passionate.

He really has every mood, every colour.

I was completely blown away by it.

And I don't think I know a single player, cellist,

who didn't feel exactly the same.

CHANTING

Although Rostropovich's long life ended in 2007,

his spirit lives on in his unique musical legacy.

108 cello works written specially for him,

15 of them masterpieces now at the heart of the cello repertoire,

including those by his compatriots,

Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and the Englishman Benjamin Britten.

You know these three kings in my life,

Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Britten, who have passed away,

give me so much easy think about my death,

because I think that when I die,

I meet these three friends once more.

At the end, Rostropovich was a Russian hero,

just as he had been in his youth, when the Communist authorities

paraded him around the world as an emblem of Soviet excellence.

But in middle age came six years of estrangement and rejection,

which led eventually to a long exile from his beloved Russia.

It all began one August day in London.

-ARCHIVE:

-'The Russian forces tighten their grip on Czechoslovakia.'

The invasion of Czechoslovakia in summer 1968

showed the raw power of his homeland, the Soviet Union,

determined to stamp out moves towards political freedom in Eastern Europe.

'At least 25 people have been killed in clashes with the invaders...'

By chance, Slava Rostropovich was in London.

He was to play at the Proms with a Soviet orchestra.

The work was the cello concerto by Dvorak.

It was the event of the season.

We suddenly realised we'd got a ticket

for a Russian orchestra, soloist and conductor

playing one of the greatest Czech works that evening.

We actually thought, "Well, maybe we shouldn't go."

Then we thought, "Well, at least it will be interesting."

There was a question, "Should it go ahead?"

Of all concertos to have to play on that day,

to play Dvorak was salt in the wound.

In those days, there weren't many Russians in London.

So the musicians were a natural target for anti-Soviet demonstrators

outside the Royal Albert Hall.

TRANSLATION: They were throwing rotten tomatoes and oranges at us,

scrunched-up bits of paper,

and they were shouting at us, "Invaders, aggressors!"

We pushed up our collars like this and slipped past,

and we felt ashamed, embarrassed.

We asked ourselves, "How could this be?"

'And here now is the conductor...'

Emotions spilled over inside the hall as well.

'..Yevgeny Svetlanov...'

-TRANSLATION:

-As we went on stage, a terrible row broke out -

people were stamping, clapping and shouting.

They wouldn't let us start playing.

And then other people shouted, "We want to hear the music"

and, you know, "Shut up" and all this sort of business.

It went on even over the opening bars of the concerto,

and it was all very, very dramatic.

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto" by Dvorak

Rostropovich's anxious wife was in the audience.

But Rostropovich found that his cello had a voice that spoke

for a whole nation.

It was a defining moment for the cello and for him.

He made it sound like a requiem,

not in a morbid way,

but in a way that expressed everything that was inside him.

I do vividly remember the pianissimo.

He made it whisper sometimes, as if he had such grief inside him,

that he could hardly get it out.

More than any other instrument,

the cello has a range that matches the human voice.

It enabled Rostropovich to speak from the heart.

It was a mingled sentiment from the audience, I think.

We'd been in the presence of a truly remarkable performance.

But also a feeling of relief, that we, as an audience,

were justified in going to this concert

because it had been turned into a demonstration of what we all felt.

TRANSLATION: Slava raised Dvorak's score above his head, like this.

He had picked up the score from the conductor's stand

and held it above his head.

He wanted to prove our solidarity with Czechoslovakia,

with the Czech people, with Dvorak's music.

There was another reason why the iron entered his soul that day.

For Rostropovich, this was not "A quarrel in a faraway country

"between people of whom he knew nothing."

It was a personal tragedy.

Slava certainly talked to us about that.

He felt terrible shame, being a Soviet citizen

and that their troops had moved in on...

Well, and for him Prague was such an important part of his life.

He loved Prague.

It was the first foreign city he'd ever visited.

He won international prizes there after the war.

It was where in his late 20s he met the woman

who became his wife, the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.

It was where he recorded the Dvorak concerto,

which became his signature piece and the piece she loved most of all.

Many years later somebody asked him, "What do you say about this

"four-day romance and marrying your wife in such a short time?"

He said, "Well, I wasted three days, didn't I?"

His experience of the joy and sadness of life

were at the heart of his music-making.

His audiences sensed that.

His students, like Mischa Maisky, discovered it at first hand.

The Rococo Variations by Tchaikovsky were a good example.

He made me do again, again, again

and it was never good enough for him.

Even though he explained very eloquently how important it is

to create the atmosphere of C minor before this variation, very dark,

and then the C major comes like a miracle,

it's the sun out of dark clouds... It still didn't please him enough.

Rostropovich knew what the cure was.

He told me, "OK, look around and pick the most beautiful girl

"you can find in this room, and look at her and play just for her."

He of course knew that it was just the beginning of my very

important love relationship with the beautiful young Polish cellist

who was there in the class of course.

Everybody knew it was her so everybody looked at her.

She turned dark red, and I kind of didn't take it too seriously,

but...I tried.

He stopped me and said,

"To hear, it's a completely different sound!"

Slava learnt a lot from singing, as well, and of course from his wife.

So he had this idea of the bow as being something like an enormous

breathing instrument that you could get this continuous legato -

his bow changes were fabulous, absolutely fantastic.

If you use the weight of the arm,

you get a very full and different sound

from just pressing down.

So, this enabled him to sustain the bow from, right from the frog,

from this end, right the way to the point.

You know, the dream of Rostropovich?

He say that because he had some beautiful and funny images

about technical aspects of the cello - once he say to me,

"You know, my dear, my dream for the bow is like hula-hoop."

I say, "Hula-hoop?"

"Yes, hula-hoop, you know, my dear, hula-hoop, it's, you know,

"the thing, you know, against, around the hips, you know."

"Ahhh, I know what you mean."

"Yes, like a hula-hoop all around the cello."

So, infinite bow, because there is, of course, limit at the bow -

once you're arrived at the tip you have to go back to the frog.

And when you are doing that

you can cut the music each time, there is no infinite sound.

When you're playing at point of the bow,

there's a very weak part of the bow.

But music, which is not based on weak and strong places in the bow,

it's based on melody and expression, requires that you can play

as strongly at the point of the bow as at the heel.

So you have to learn a way to really cling to the string.

What is impressive...

body has weight, and arm and shoulder has weight,

and the cello is a perfect instrument.

Cello is in front of you, and you can put the weight of your arm

and shoulder into this instrument, with bow.

He does that so well.

His music is so connected...

..very much connected with his body weight and ground.

And in between there is a cello instrument.

In the late 1940s and early '50s,

Rostropovich was the darling of the Soviet cultural scene.

Through his characteristic charm and cunning

he always managed to manipulate the bureaucrats of Moscow.

They had nothing against him travelling, going anywhere.

And he was so enchanting that they also thought that he would be

the most marvellous ambassador for them.

He often told the story of how he managed to take his wife with him -

not with the normal excuse that he was ill and needed looking after.

His application was more cheeky.

Rostropovich wrote exactly opposite. "Because I am very healthy man

"I would like my wife to come with me

"on this three-month concert tour."

The authorities were in thrall to his talent.

At 23 he received the Stalin prize.

Stalin prize was the highest award at the time,

23 years old and he was a star, he was a genius

and he brought a lot of glory to the Soviet Union.

He was one of the jewels in the crown.

In a sense they were trained like the athletes,

to the highest level, whether it was Olympics, or athletics,

or international piano competitions.

He was particularly, I thought, anxious to give credit to the whole

Soviet system of teaching and support for artists

because it was critical for him.

He was just 21, and still in awe of the system,

when two of his heroes, the composers Dmitri Shostakovich

and Sergei Prokofiev, were officially disgraced for writing

"Cacophonous music" that was "organically alien to the people."

"No harmony," it was said, "no tunefulness or melody."

First shock in my life about Soviet system.

Before I believed enormous for Stalin, for the system,

for everything what we all more or less believed.

He took the first major risk of his career by befriending Prokofiev.

He went to stay with the isolated and impoverished composer

at his country house outside Moscow.

Prokofiev re-worked his cello concerto with Rostropovich's help

in the early '50s.

Their creative partnership was obvious

to the orchestral musicians in Moscow.

TRANSLATION: From the first few bars it was clear that Rostropovich

had made this concerto his own.

It was very close to him.

He had absorbed all the feelings

and thoughts that had gone into its composition.

The Symphony-Concerto, as Prokofiev called it, was the first major work

written specially for Rostropovich, who was then 25.

Even today it's a formidable challenge for any cellist.

Prokofiev Sinfonia Concertante, when it came out, was considered unplayable by any other cellist.

And specially the cadenza inside the second movement.

TRANSLATION: Slava would say to Prokofiev, "Sergei Sergeyevich,

"let's change some things in the cadenza,"

and right there, at the rehearsal,

he'd play certain sections in his own way.

He'd ask "Sergei Sergeyevich, do you mind?"

And Prokofiev replied, "All right, good, I agree."

Rostropovich set new challenges for the virtuosity of cellists.

And with almost missionary zeal, he went on to influence

each new generation.

I opened the door, he's there and I was like... Oh!

And he just, you know, sees me and, and say, "Ah, toi, magnifique!"

Makes two, two kisses on the both cheeks

and just leave me like that, completely...astonished, you know?

That was the first real meeting with him.

We were taken backstage and he kind of gave me a bear hug and said,

"Oh, no, Lisinka," and I'd never met him and suddenly he said,

"When are you coming to play for me, tomorrow?"

And I went, "Oh, oooh, oh..."

I can remember exactly the feeling of almost being on a knife edge

or on the edge of a precipice as it were,

and I knew that if things went reasonably well

I might stay on it, otherwise I might, you know...

go down there.

So it was an altogether very heightened moment in my life.

HE SHOUTS ANIMATEDLY

You know what they say, it's very difficult to meet an idol.

You can be disappointed.

And in the case of Rostropovich, it was just the other way around.

He was so warm, he was so funny and he was so friendly.

I had no idea how much money do you pay Rostropovich for a lesson -

you know, he's the most famous cellist in the world,

probably the most expensive.

So I had an absolute wad of notes in my pocket,

and I was expecting £100 or something.

And he said, "One penny. I want one penny!"

And I thought this was a big joke,

so I sort of laughed and he said, "No, no, give me one penny."

And I had to find a penny to give him.

For 25 years, Professor Rostropovich held what amounted

to masterclasses on the third floor of the Moscow Conservatoire.

They were all-Russian affairs, apart from a few foreigners

like Elizabeth Wilson, who joined Class 19

for lessons they will never forget.

Gosh, this is amazing. Nothing has really changed.

There would be a scout by the lift and they'd say,

"He's come, he's come. We can smell he's come."

Because he put lots of perfume on, so the first thing was the smell

of the Ma Griffe perfume or whatever it was.

And the second was his voice, you could hear...

"Hello, dear, how are you?" You could hear him.

And we all knew - get ready,

the first person would be sitting there ready to play.

Very often nobody knew who was going to play next,

so we'd all be thinking, "Should I be getting keyed up

"for the next one?"

So we were all pretty much on tenterhooks.

And of course beforehand, out in the corridor,

everybody had been playing away and practising.

I had to stop, I had to sometimes sit down, take a breath -

I mean it took me quite a long time to arrive there,

and then behind the door, standing there...

You have to cross the threshold, you have to open the door,

you come in and you have to play as well.

You weren't much further away from him than I am from you,

and nothing escaped this man, absolutely nothing,

it didn't matter what it was,

it felt like he was just going into your brain.

Even I'm starting now...

And it all comes back.

Well, it's a... What is it?

Pushing an envelope, you know, sort of pushing your boundaries.

The room seems to me smaller, but it's probably a trick of memory.

And what would happen was that all the people would come in

and there were chairs along the wall here, under these portraits,

and there were cellos everywhere.

People were packed in, sometimes three or four deep in the room,

all round the sides of the room, on every available ledge or...

Often people were outside,

with their faces peeking through the door.

Other teachers, other famous soloists,

would drop in to watch Rostropovich at work.

He never brought a cello.

I don't remember one time when he brought his own cello.

What would happen is when he started teaching, he'd get inspired

and then he'd go to this piano,

and the cellist would be sitting here,

sort of playing, as it were, with this pianist,

and you'd have an accompaniment of two pianos

which is quite devastating,

and all this audience, so you had to play as if it was a public concert.

SPEAKS RUSSIAN

THEY PLAY ON THE PIANO AND CELLO

Rostropovich seldom talked about cello technique.

He preferred to concentrate on the music itself.

VOICE OF ROSTROPOVICH SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN

Here he is playing the piano himself, just there,

two pianos in the class.

VOICE OF ROSTROPOVICH, SHOUTING ANIMATEDLY

Everybody found it tough,

even graduate students like Natalya Gutman.

-TRANSLATION:

-He called me a policeman in a glass booth,

as though I was controlling myself too much.

VOICE OF ROSTRPOVICH

Now he's telling Natalya, "You don't suit the sonata

"and the sonata is not going to suit itself to you. You've got to change.

"You're so dry. You should weep from this music!

"And there's nothing shameful about weeping about Rachmaninov's music!"

Perhaps at the lesson I wasn't able to achieve what he wanted straightaway,

but I understood this lack of lyricism was a weak point for me.

He was totally unpredictable with his timetable.

He could be three hours late, he could be four hours,

and we knew that, we didn't mind, we sit and wait.

And I remember one occasion we were here from ten in the morning

and he only arrived at six in the evening,

and everybody was exhausted and also fairly hysterical by that stage.

My personal record was once ten hours.

You know - I was sitting, actually I was sitting out of sheer stubbornness

and determination that I have to wait, you know,

it's interesting. He came, and there was a lesson, but I don't think...

I mean, I was so deadly tired.

VOICE OF ROSTROPOVICH

He doesn't like the rhythm at all. He says, "You've got to hear these semiquavers,

"you've got to divide it up and really feel each one so that you are exact."

ROSTROPOVICH PLAYS THE PIANO

VOICE OF ROSTROPOVICH

So each note is like a shield, and behind the shield

you have a kind of machine gun fire of small notes like a kind of motor going on.

VOICE OF ROSTROPOVICH

ROSTROPOVICH MAKES GROANING SOUND

That's a very cruel comparison,

saying it sounds like pancake batter being thrown at somebody,

slopping all down your face, it's so unrhythmic.

All the students of Class 19 were treated to a stream of visual ideas about music,

which could be sometimes funny, sometimes brutal.

An Armenian student was playing Locatelli sonata,

which has a lot of very, very difficult technical things in it,

where you have to do repeated staccato notes in one bow, so you play up bow,

da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-bee, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-bee,

and then you have to do it down bow as well, ya-da-da-da-da-da, ya-da-da-da-da-da.

MUSIC: "Cello Sonata" by Locatelli

And this student actually was brilliant at this,

and it's not everybody who can do this, even, even the greats.

And Slava looked pretty grim throughout the whole thing,

and most of the rest of us were all amazed at what this chap was doing.

Slava said to him, "You know, I want you to imagine the most beautiful suitcase in the world,

"made of crocodile skin. You can't imagine how beautiful this is, it's got incredible gold buckles on it."

So the student was looking a bit surprised.

"Now, take it, take it," you know, "Put your hands up, take it!"

The chap was sort of at a loss to know what to do.

He said, "Take it, take it." So he sort of puts out his hands, he takes it.

He said, "Now, open it."

So he sort of does this.

"What's inside it?"

"Nothing. That's you."

"You can do everything on the surface, it's all brilliant,

"but you haven't got any ideas inside you."

And all our mouths fell open, you know,

at this incredible sort of analogy, I mean, it was so...

..I-I mean, absolutely devastating.

These frightened faces tell everything.

I remember sitting there thinking, "My God, I hope it's not me next."

He was such an unbelievable life force.

How he was able to do most of the things he did,

it's just mind-boggling.

He lived life to the full and beyond.

He always used to say,

"The only time people are happier than when I arrive is when I leave."

Because everybody's so exhausted.

As students, we'd all be absolutely wiped.

He would then go on and conduct an opera

at the Bolshoi Theatre, having just taught for about nine hours.

I mean, his energy was just absolutely phenomenal.

He liked drinking...

..eating, he liked life so much. He loved life.

He could consume amount of hard liquor, mostly vodka.

He was a man of big appetites

and that included an appetite for life,

and that comes across in his music-making.

He didn't seem to sleep that much.

Two or three hours per night, no more.

Or not at all, sometimes.

If you just think of what he got through in a day or in a week -

and that doesn't include all the women and things,

which perhaps we shouldn't talk about too much!

He never missed spotting a pretty girl.

I never met anybody like this guy.

So many jokes, and so many dirty jokes.

He would kiss anything he could kiss.

TRANSLATION: He'd kiss stage technicians, lighting men, stage directors, conductors.

Sometimes one felt that people simply couldn't un-stick themselves from him.

He exploited his personal magnetism ruthlessly to expand the cello repertoire.

He saw it as his duty, and not just in the music of his own time.

When an 18th-century concerto by Haydn was discovered in 1961,

he adopted it as one of his signature pieces.

Perhaps it made up for the fact that Mozart never wrote a cello concerto.

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto No.1" by Haydn

He said, "When I die, I go and I will look for my colleagues,

"cellists of the time of Mozart. I'll go onto that cloud,

"I'll look for them, and I will be very upset with them

"because they never convinced Mozart to write for cello."

That was his way of thinking!

He remorselessly convinced contemporary composers of the cello's merits.

He'd begun with only three concerto works in his repertoire,

by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens.

The cello was then the poor relation of the violin.

Everybody had always tended to think the violin was a more virtuoso instrument.

Slava could play anything on the cello that you can play on the violin,

or on any other instrument. So I think he, in a way, opened up the eyes of composers,

as well as cellists.

Rostropovich, at quite an early stage, passed the 100 mark

in first performances of cello works.

But there's no doubt that he'd just eclipsed anybody else.

And if even a fraction of it lasts,

it'll be much more than any of his predecessors did.

When he get this music from the composer,

he become soldier to get this music out of a score

to the audience ear.

Assured and confident, the musical soldier was eagerly recruited

by the Russian composer Shostakovich, who was shy and nervous.

They were chalk and cheese, but their relationship was surprisingly close.

MUSIC: "Concerto No. 2" by Shostakovich

Shostakovich became his friend and neighbour.

Rostropovich was at ease with him, as he had been with Prokofiev,

and Shostakovich trusted him.

He called to me and tell me, "Slava, you must come to my house now!"

But of course! And I come to him, and he take chair near to him, opposite him.

He said, "Slava, sit down, sit in this chair."

I sit. He tell me, "Slava, now...not speaking, just sit down."

They would sit literally for an hour and a half not saying a word,

not saying a word. It was a very particular friendship. And then...

-Not say a word?

-Not say a word, in silence.

For me, if not speaking two minutes, for me like a half-life, you know?

Two minutes, maybe five minutes not speaking,

maybe...maybe seven minutes, I don't know how,

but, for me, feeling that half-life. And I sit just across to him.

And after a long time, he stand up,

and tell me, "Slava, thank you very much.

"That's now much easier coming life for me.

"Thank you, bye-bye."

MUSIC: "Concerto No. 2" by Shostakovich

It's absolutely fantastic playing.

-TRANSLATION:

-It's amazing he played so brilliantly at the premiere.

As usual, he had memorised the whole piece.

-TRANSLATION:

-The power and energy!

It's coming to the climax now. The intensity of playing is just...

..the trump call.

When the orchestra takes over, most soloists welcome the rest.

Not Rostropovich.

But he never took his eye off the ball.

Watch this. His next entry is a fiendish piece of double-stopping,

high up, and playing two strings at once.

A quick check he has the right notes,

and he's off at full tilt - a daring high wire act, with no safety net.

To see it that close,

and to see Shostakovich reaction...

He never showed emotions,

but you can say from there, he's deeply, deeply moved.

-TRANSLATION:

-Rostropovich loved Dmitri

and Dmitri loved Rostropovich.

That was the basis of their relationship.

That's why it worked out so well.

MUSIC: "Cello Concerto" by Haydn

When you saw Rostropovich's hands,

they were the most beautiful hands I've seen from any string player.

The sort of musician's hands that musicians are supposed to have,

but hardly ever do have.

They had the most beautiful long, tapering fingers.

He probably had the biggest stretch of any cellist I've ever seen in my life,

which also meant that a lot of technical passages

he could manage with fingers that nobody else could actually get near!

This is fascinating, because the length of his fourth finger is quite extraordinary.

Longer than most people's first finger.

And very even length of fingers,

which makes a huge difference for playing the cello.

If you have very different lengths of your fingers,

it's much more difficult.

He had the most incredibly sensitive feeling in his hands.

You can see that, the way he actually puts his hands on the fingerboard -

there's no extraneous pressure, it's just beautifully placed.

A lot of people get a lot of problems by over-pressing and over-gripping,

but you never get that sensation.

The fingers are absolutely bedded on the strings,

just an amazing sort of contact there.

I think you would tell from his hands that he was an amazingly sensitive person.

So, he wasn't...he wasn't just a sort of grizzly bear going around...

I mean, I've been hugged and kissed three times by him,

quite a few times, you know! And I didn't know him that well.

MUSIC: "Back in the USSR" by The Beatles

Rostropovich's two teenage daughters saw a different side of him.

He may have been one of the Soviet Union's freer spirits,

but he was not an indulgent father.

He would not allow us a bit of make-up or any extravagant dresses.

By extravagant I mean two centimetres above the knee!

# Back in the USSR! #

He had to be in control of things, you know,

and he has two daughters

and then they grow up and the boys start showing around,

and he was very jealous. Very jealous, you know.

# Moscow girls make me sing and shout

# That Georgia's always on my mind... #

My mother bought us, brought from one of the trips that she took,

she brought us jeans.

In Moscow, at that time, we did not have jeans,

it was a dream of everybody to have jeans,

and ones that appear on the black market cost a fortune.

Just to make it even more, you know, more fabulous,

I took some stitches out, you know, to make it really fluffy, here and there.

And I put some little patches over - cats, little dogs,

nothing offensive, just very simple.

It was unbelievable. It was...I was a hit, you know, in the neighbourhood.

It was our most precious possession ever. Ever.

One day, he saw us, and he told us, "Bring the jeans here." And we didn't know why, you know.

He got these pairs of jeans, put it on a terrace in our country house -

a country house made of wood, by the way, just a side remark.

I knew something terrible was going to happen, so I was not paying attention what exactly,

-how he's going to set it on fire.

-Put over gasoline and burned it.

And then we were crying with my sister, it was very dramatic, I mean.

Black smoke was coming out of our country house.

My mother appeared and she thought somebody died -

we're all standing there with these long faces, my father very glorious there.

She comes in and she says, "Oh, Rostropovich" - my father,

standing there stirring this whole thing, "See what I've done, it's not going to poison my life any more,

"I'm a happy person now," you know? That was the story of the jeans.

# Back in the USSR... #

Rostropovich was more relaxed with the Western composers now writing for him.

He gave them a free hand.

He told the French composer Henri Dutilleux

not to be afraid of pushing the technical boundaries of the cello.

He said to me, "Everything is possible.

"Change nothing, because...

"..you must be absolutely free."

Now, listen to this metamorphosis, this harmonics,

this F sharp...

..turning into the real note.

It's incredible.

Many violinists could be jealous about this intonation.

Dutilleux kept sending scraps of music

to Rostropovich for him to learn. It gave him confidence.

But when they met three weeks before the premiere,

he was in for a shock.

He was not ready, he was not ready, and how is possible,

three weeks before?

He said to me, "Henri, we have a studio to work during the night

"and we work three weeks

"and it is possible, it is possible",

and I have said, "Yes, we try."

By the time of the first performance,

the composer realised he need not have worried.

Immediately, I have understand that Slava knew the piece

very well.

He was so gifted, he played the piece by heart,

by memory without reading his part.

MUSIC PLAYS

Very impressive.

You can feel in this recording

all the love he had for the composers.

Rostropovich wanted to ensure that cellists of the future

would have many more great works to play than he'd had as a young man.

I asked him once, "Do you really believe that every piece

"they write for you and you learn and play

"is so great and worth your time and effort?"

He said, "Of course not, but I know if I will make it a rule,

"I will play every piece written for me at least once.

"The composers know it and they will keep writing.

"And then out of ten of those pieces, "nine will disappear, but one will remain as a masterpiece."

And that's how the concertos by Shostakovich,

Prokofiev Symphony-Concerto, Britten, of course,

all music he wrote for the cello, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Dutilleux,

were created, these incredible masterpieces of the 20th Century.

He embarked on several concerto marathons,

playing 44 different works in 11 concerts in just a few weeks,

many of them inspired by him.

It was a high-risk strategy, as his conductor discovered

when they tackled the rarely-heard concerto by Paul Hindemith.

TRANSLATION: He didn't know it, he simply didn't know what it was about.

When one of the concerts was over, and it finished late,

around midnight, he was in a great hurry to leave.

He asked me to come with him to the Soviet Embassy where there was a piano.

And he asked me to play the Hindemith Concerto through with him, bar by bar.

We would stop after each bar and start again,

and in this way, we played through the whole concerto.

This went on until four in the morning.

At 10am, he started rehearsing it with the orchestra,

without a single mistake.

The most productive of all his relationships with composers

began in London, in September 1960.

Rostropovich had arrived with Shostakovich

to rehearse and perform his friend's first cello concerto.

He had no idea that in the audience

would be the British composer, Benjamin Britten.

At that stage, he barely knew his name, let alone his music.

Yet before the day was out, Rostropovich's playing

was to spark a momentous friendship with the British composer,

and a major enrichment of the cello repertoire.

That evening, Britten sat beside Shostakovich

and kept nudging him with his elbow in delight.

He said he felt liberated by Rostropovich's new,

uninhibited way of playing the cello.

After the concert, we were all sitting together in the box,

Rostropovich came up to see Shostakovich there

and Britten came in and that was it.

Three geniuses in one festival hall box.

Britten had never composed for the solo cello before.

He set to work immediately.

Composers often find inspiration in particular performers.

But Britten's clutch of five new works

was driven more by mutual devotion.

My father had such a tenderness and so much love for Britten.

Every time name Britten would be mentioned,

my father always he had a smile,

I don't know how it happened, it always, you'd say "Britten..."

"Oh Benjik", you know, always had a smile on his face.

And then, of course, there was the music.

I mean, Britten was just in love with this playing

and Rostropovich was in love with the kind of music that came out.

He said to me, "It's like a man waking up at night

"and it's dark, and the guy is terrified, frightened."

Pa-pa-pa-pa! Pe-pa-pe-pa!

And he's trying desperately to find the light,

and touching the walls like that, you know?

And I always have this image.

It was in 1970 that darkness began to envelop Rostropovich himself.

Until that point, he had relished the Soviet limelight.

Just as he could do anything he wanted on the cello,

he felt he had special latitude within the Soviet system.

As an honoured member of the artistic elite.

He had incredible privileges, he had a flat in central Moscow,

he had a country house outside Moscow, he had cars.

I went there, the apartment was a bit of a treasure trove, really,

by Soviet standards, all kind of Western equipment in there.

The family's comfort was sanctioned by the authorities,

in sharp contrast with the way they treated dissidents.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich,

was under increasing persecution because of his frank portrayal

of the dark side of the Soviet Union.

Rostropovich offered him shelter at his country house outside Moscow,

where Solzhenitsyn stayed as his guest.

My father introduced him to us as a teacher of mathematic,

and I was so scared.

He said to us this is a new member of our family,

his name is Uncle Sanya, you know,

and he's going to be staying with us for a while.

When the so-called maths teacher won the Nobel Prize for literature,

Moscow stepped up its campaign against him.

Word of Rostropovich's private gesture of support began to spread.

He felt he had to speak out, and drafted a letter to the Soviet press,

defending Solzhenitsyn and artistic freedom.

It was open defiance of the authorities,

and not even his privileged status would protect him,

as his wife knew only too well.

He complained that literary and musical talent

was being crushed by the party line.

The letter wasn't published, and he never circulated it.

But word got out.

TRANSLATION: Shostakovich was horrified

because he could foresee the consequences.

But Slava said Solzhenitsyn was being persecuted,

and he had to defend him.

Many times Solzhenitsyn tell for us maybe I go from your house,

for make a little bit easier for you.

But my wife and I not accept this.

I tell you, if ask me what I make in my life

the best step....

I'll not found it in music,

but in my life best step, that's only one page of this letter.

And since this moment, my conscience was clean and clear.

Rostropovich found his concerts cancelled.

People were told he was ill.

His recordings were suppressed.

One Moscow concert, featuring Beethoven's Triple Concerto,

was allowed to go ahead,

but the authorities soon realised what a mistake that was.

The voice of his cello was too powerful.

It was an extraordinary concert because there was such tension,

and everybody knew that Rostropovich had done this very brave thing.

And the audience gave him a standing ovation.

It was very much for him, and they applauded him

for seven minutes without stopping, a standing ovation.

And of course that was seen as provocation by the Soviets,

they thought this, you know, he was provoking the audience to demonstrate

against the Soviet authorities, they saw everything in that light.

Rostropovich's main contact in the Soviet government was the glamorous,

but notorious Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva,

who held the destinies of Russian artists in her hands.

Slava himself told me he had to go to see her at the Ministry of Culture.

And he went into her office and she was standing,

looking out the window with her back to him,

and she said to him, "Slava, why are you doing this?"

He explained I suppose, and she turned around and she said,

"Do you realise what you're doing, not only to you, but to me as well?"

And she had tears rolling down her face, apparently.

So this was an astonishing side to her

that you don't hear from any other people,

because she was such a battleaxe in terms of obstructing people.

And Slava told me he actually respected her, he had a,

he had a feeling that she was as caught in the system as he was.

He was still allowed to teach in Class 19,

but virtually the only places he could perform

were in remote parts of the Soviet Union.

His wife could justly say I told you so.

Before my house was open door, so many people coming, my guests,

my friends, and always non-stop telephone ring.

But over the last two years,

I was near to alone in my home and my family,

because all people, even my friends,

worried, make contact with me. Yes.

The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski

wrote a cello concerto for him at the start of his troubles.

Rostropovich recognised his own story in the music.

He said to him, "This concerto is about you, it's your portrait."

In which he was the rather pitiful hero,

who was being pursued by enemies.

There's a wonderful moment when all the strings come together in the end of the slow movement

and they come in a unison which is led by the cello.

MUSIC: "Cantilena" from Cello Concerto by Lutoslawski

And after that there are some very dramatic entries by the brass,

which come in really blasting away.

BLAST OF BRASS INSTRUMENTS

And he would say,

"That's a whole central committee against me there."

FRANTIC BRASS CONTINUES

He was saying, "You are playing and then all these people..."

or, you know, "All these authorities, they are shouting there."

DISCORDANT CELLO MELODY

And then the cello will be left as a single voice,

and at the end there's a very little kind of wailing phrase,

and he said, "That's me, that's me dying."

MELANCHOLY CELLO MELODY

Almost incredibly, some of his musical colleagues in Moscow

began to question his musicianship, as both cellist and conductor.

And, equally incredibly, Rostropovich began to believe them.

I think they just really wanted to destroy him

because my father was very sensitive person.

Destroy my mother, not possible.

Destroy my father, yes, you know, because he would be very vulnerable.

The director of the opera theatre said, "Listen, you know,

"you shouldn't be conducting, you know, you're not good enough for this orchestra.

"You're just no longer a good musician."

And my father said that he start crying like a child.

He was standing there and crying like a child

because he just could not believe that, you know.

And then he came home and my mother saw him and that's when she said,

"OK, that's it, we're going to write a letter. That's it.

"We're out."

At Galina's instigation,

Rostropovich wrote to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev,

in March 1974, and applied to work abroad for two years.

He hoped it would make the Kremlin bring him back into the fold.

But within hours, Brezhnev said, "OK, go!"

Ahead of his family, Rostropovich flew to London

to look for work and somewhere to live.

He was met by his British friends,

the impresarios Lillian and Victor Hochhauser,

and his former pupil Elizabeth Wilson.

We were able to go right up to the steps of the aeroplane.

And it was extraordinary. When it arrived, out of the front door of the aeroplane,

Slava descended the steps with a Newfoundland dog,

an enormous Newfoundland dog, and two cellos.

Kuzya, his name was,

this great dog that came off.

Not knowing anything about quarantine laws,

the dog was sent back immediately on the plane.

There was a terrible stink. They said, "Tell him to go back!"

And I said, "You can't do that, he's just...

We're saying you can't. "Oh, no, no, you must tell him to go back.

"The dog can't touch the ground. We've got to get the van round."

Poor man. Here he was being told to go back.

He thought, "What are they doing?

"Are they going to send me back to the Soviet Union?"

Though he wasn't actually deported, it felt like he was being deported.

And he was extremely low at that time.

Here he suddenly was adrift. he had no structure here.

He's very grateful to everybody

for the very warm welcome he's had in London.

HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

I would like to underline the fact

that both myself and all my family remain Soviet citizens.

I think he was scared because it was a tremendous responsibility.

He was thrown out of his country. We had no money, no money at all.

HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

And I'd also like to say that I love very deeply and very sincerely

my country and my people.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

His exile lasted 16 years.

Moscow barred the door against him.

It made him an international celebrity.

But he had to learn how to fend for himself.

I remember him sort of saying, "I wonder if anybody would want to employ me."

MUSIC: Sarabande by Johann Sebastian Bach

This Sarabande, by Johann Sebastian Bach,

was the piece he'd played as an encore at the Proms six years before,

when he'd first stood out against his homeland over the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

His cello may have been a solitary voice,

but it expressed a nation's grief and his own.

It was incredibly moving.

I mean, he was weeping, you know, copiously during that,

but still managed to play.

He seems to be actually carving it out of the living rock,

like Michelangelo.

And Rostropovich had that monumental quality to him.

The recording doesn't exist of that particular performance,

but I'm not sure I would want to hear it.

Rostropovich said he liked to offer the Sarabande to those who felt sad.

As when years later, his friend, the Japanese sumo wrestler, Chionofuji,

lost his baby daughter.

Slava found out, came with his own cello from Europe,

and took taxi to Chiyonofuji's house without telling anyone, nobody,

with the cello and front of house,

and then played Sarabande of Bach as his prayer to Chiyonofuji,

champion's daughter who just died.

Taxi was waiting and came back to Tokyo Airport, Narita,

which takes one hour and a half, and then flew back to Europe.

Can you imagine?

His years in the West brought Rostropovich wider fame and wealth.

He bought himself a Stradivarius cello.

He became the friend of kings and queens.

But despite being stripped of his Soviet citizenship,

he always longed to be back in Russia.

ARCHIVE: As protestors moved in,

the tanks rolled forward and opened fire...

So when Soviet tanks were back on the streets, this time in Moscow,

in the dying days of the Soviet Union,

he felt pulled back to his native land.

Hardline Communists were hoping to seize control

from Boris Yeltsin and the liberals.

Slava was in Paris with his daughter Elena,

while Galina was in England.

And we spent the whole night watching.

Then he said to me, "You know, I think I'm going to go Russia." I said, "Are you kidding?

"You have responsibilities, you can't just go. Besides, where will you go?"

At the age of 64,

Galina's Pinocchio was as impulsive as ever.

Next day he wakes up and I see him all dressed up,

with this beautiful suit and he has a briefcase.

Since I went with him everywhere, I said, "Where are you going?"

He said, "Oh, I'm going to the bank.

"But please stay for lunch because I'd like to have lunch with you."

And that's where he got me!

12 o'clock, one o'clock, two, three,

and we didn't have mobile phones.

So I keep waiting and I call the banker,

and she said she never saw him and they didn't have a meeting.

Then I start getting worried because now I don't know what to think.

Elena's sister Olga was in America, where she got a message

that her father had been spotted on a plane to Moscow.

So I called my mother. She said, "This is stupid, this is not possible."

But later on, she received a phone call.

"Thank you very much."

He bought a ticket to Japan cos he hadn't got a visa,

so, you know, stopping off in Moscow.

He got out, talked his way through customs, and then he was in the building with Yeltsin,

cos he thought because he was famous

there was just a 1% greater chance maybe

that, you know, the tanks wouldn't move in.

It could be end of Slava there, that time, you know,

and Slava cannot help anything.

I know it, he knew it. But this is, er Slava.

I called my mother, and I said,

"Mum, you know, don't worry about anything he is fine, but he's in Moscow in the White House."

There was a silence and then she start screaming in the,

you know, like calling him all kinds of names - she was right -

and getting it all out, you know, like,

"How could he, this and that,

"how could you do this and not telling me?"

You know, she really had to...

And then, when it was over, she started crying.

We saw the newspaper, he had a gun from young soldier

and the young soldier is sleeping and he looks so tired

but he still carrying his gun, this young soldier's gun.

He was so proud 'cause this guy was his bodyguard, and after

about 36 hours without sleep, this guy couldn't stay awake any longer,

So Slava said, "I'll look after the gun, and you go to sleep."

To me he was so stupid to do this and I told him so stupid.

He was so mad at me, that he convince me he had to do it.

So I said, "All right, all right."

And then, of course, you know,

when my father finally called to Galina, to Mama, she said,

"Don't you ever, ever come back to me!

"If you do I am going to kill you!"

Then when he came back I was so proud of him.

I was waiting for him at the airport when he arrived, he was arriving, I mean, he was my hero.

His family and friends had not taken into account

that for Rostropovich, thoughts of death were part of life.

His later pupils had a sense of that.

He gave me a great, great lesson on this Schumann concerto.

He said, but not in a mean way,

"You play that, you know, as I was playing that when I was young.

"Now I am going to give you the keys."

That was one of his favourite expression.

"I'm going to give you the keys to perform that as an old person."

It was so touching, because you could sense, you could feel,

that it was an old person that knows that the end is approaching.

All the feelings, you know, all the memories.

He said to me,

"You know, there it's like souvenir of a music you hear behind a door.

Because there was the feeling of the memory that has escaped.

And it's behind the door.

My life so full,

and God give my life, make my life so rich for friendship,

rich for love, rich for beauty, what I have in my life.

And I think about my last presence in this world.

For Rostropovich, music coloured every aspect of both beauty

and suffering.

As when he played the Arpeggione Sonata by Schubert,

with Benjamin Britten at the piano.

He said to me,

imagine Schubert with little glasses, round glasses,

and he's sitting there composing this piece, you know,

and he's just looking out of the window.

And it's like autumn and the rain is falling and just the silence

and hear the raindrops and sort of, you know, like...

The sun is not there, it's like sort of like kind of a mist, you know.

I mean, and now he says,

"Imagine this, silence. Do you hear the rain, you hear it?"

I said, "Yeah." He said, "Now you start."

SOLO PIANO

The way Britten played the opening of this sonata it was just...

After this, I'm sure for Rostropovich to match this miraculous atmosphere

it took all of his concentration and talent and abilities.

CELLO ENTERS

To me, there's nothing more beautiful or more magical.

It takes you somewhere on a different plane, it does.

It says to me that life is beautiful, life is eternal,

it's without the boundaries, it's without the language,

it's without countries,

because you have two people, two instruments,

but, in the end, when you listen to it, it sounds just like one.

His cello playing and his prayer

to the god...

To me, same thing.

Schubert Arpeggione being very special piece for every cellist

since some of the most beautiful,

but at the same time most difficult, pieces for cello.

It's like walking on ice a bit, no matter how many times you play it.

You know when he got ill, in the last days when he was

already in a sleep, and we decided to bring him some music,

to stimulate him or to make him listen to some of his recordings.

And then, we put the Arpeggione Sonata.

And, you know, I looked at him, and although he was in a deep sleep,

there was a tear coming down his cheek.

It was absolutely, he was crying when he was listening to it, you know.

Was it a piece your father played often?

No, once he played it with Britten,

he didn't want to play it with anyone else.

TRANSLATION: In one of my last conversations with Rostropovich,

he told me, "I'm not afraid of death, you know,

"because when I go up to heaven,

"I'm sure the first person I meet will be Ben, Benjamin Britten.

"And we'll have a really good party up there!"

Before his death in 1976, Britten had given many concerts

and recitals with Rostropovich.

But their collaboration on Britten's own cello music was never

apparently captured on film.

In Moscow, Rostropovich premiered the biggest work,

the Cello Symphony, with Britten conducting.

Photographs were published at the time,

but in the course of making this programme,

we discovered unedited cine film of that first performance

languishing in a Russian archive, without any sound.

So we matched it to the Russian radio recording of the concert,

and invited some of Rostropovich's friends to see this unique evidence

of his bond with Britten, and his enduring legacy.

And absolutely it's speaking.

And so tender.

Such incredible sensitivity in his left hand, isn't there?

Amazing sort of finesse and beauty of the sound.

Comes to mind always when we talked about vibrato,

and expressivity of vibrato,

all those years back.

Britten is also involved in a very high emotional level.

There's a tangible kind of tension in the air between them.

And this moment is just so glorious when the major comes back.

And now we start this building up...

-Incredible, isn't it?

-Yes.

Look at Slava! He's just... absolutely totally in this.

He's playing inside the music, 100%.

And, at the same time, it's absolutely fantastic playing.

-It's absolutely ecstatic.

-Yes.

-Such phenomenal projection he had.

-Yes.

FINAL CHORD SWELLS AND ENDS

APPLAUSE ON ARCHIVE FILM

Wow!

APPLAUSE ON FILM DROWNS SPEECH

I don't know.

That's the most moving piece of film of him I think I've ever seen.

His ability, as a first performer of works,

to get right under the skin and to live them.

How can he do that, how can he understand

the composer's intentions with such emotional force?

And, of course, convey it, and to see Britten and him together,

sharing that, it makes me think of what Shostakovich said about him,

he said he was a co-author of many new works.

And I think, in that sense,

I can't think of any other performer who was able to do that.

As we say, the first emotion, it's very, very touching,

you think you remember and then you see something like that,

and it's a deja vu effect, it comes straight here!

He was so passionate about that music, it's very touching somehow.

That amazing beautiful sort of way that he, you know,

uses his hands on the cello.

Ah! It's just like having another lesson, you know!

'Friends, I sorry that I not with you.

'I love you, I appreciate you.'

And I would like wish to you much much love,

much happiness, and all best!

He loves people.

He loves life.

He loves your life.

And that will find out in five second. Maximum ten second.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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