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 Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 3:55 am |
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TLS 7.5.11: G. S. Smith: Playing with fire
MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH. Cellist, teacher, legend. By Elizabeth Wilson. 320pp.
Faber. Pounds 25 - 978 0 571 22051 9.
When, how and why did Russia's post-Stalin renaissance go wrong? When
searching for anwers, few people would begin with the performing arts.
Contemplating the life of Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, though, might
persuade them that his professional domain may have been indicative. It
certainly had wide repercussions, especially for the highly consequential
matter of shaping the country's reputation abroad and the resulting
political responses. Rostropovich was one of the very brightest and best
talents to emerge in any area of Soviet high culture, and he had
commensurate levels of energy and commitment. By the 1963-4 season, when he
performed forty-four different works -the entire existing major repertoire
for his instrument -in eleven concerts, he had risen as high as an artist
could rise in his society without sidestepping into administration. Less
than a decade later, though, he was disgraced, discarded and anathematized.
Fortunately, by this time the Party no longer exterminated those who fell
foul of it, and Rostropovich survived into another precarious period of
bright hopes and dark fears in some ways comparable with the time of his
early flowering.
In addition to the massive body of his recordings, and the articles he
published in the Soviet musical press before he left, a good deal of
documentation on Rostropovich's career appeared in Russian after his
rehabilitation. Elizabeth Wilson draws on these materials, but her book is a
valuable new source of information because of the first-hand testimony she
has gathered. Although she could have done more to explain the specifically
Soviet phenomena she mentions, her book has large-scale coherence and is
never really obscure. Before Wilson, nobody had described so well the
specific context from which Rostropovich emerged; for people outside Russia,
his background was cast into obscurity by his coruscating presence among us
for more than thirty years.
Elizabeth Wilson is not concerned here with this apotheosis; the main body
of her story starts with Rostropovich's birth in provincial Baku and ends
with his emigration (or exile; the distinction is hard to draw precisely)
from the USSR in 1974.
Wilson is already the author of books on Jacqueline du Pre and Shostakovich.
A cellist herself, in the 1960s she was one of very few non-Soviet citizens
to study in Rostropovich's class at the Moscow Conservatoire. Her book draws
extensively on interviews with her mentor and hero that continued up to the
last years of his life. Her father, Sir Duncan Wilson, was appointed British
Ambassador in Moscow in 1968, and was thus in post during the critical
period leading up to Rostropovich's departure from Russia. In fact, the
Wilson family were on hand to welcome Rostropovich at Heathrow when he made
his decisive move, bringing with him two cellos and a large Newfoundland dog
that had much more difficulty being admitted than its master. Before that,
the Wilsons had acted as facilitators for Russians in their dealings with
the Western artistic and diplomatic world. Perhaps one day someone will
incorporate this information into a general account and make it possible to
assess how important contacts with non-Russians were in the postStalin
period, a huge question not easy to answer at the moment.
For roughly half its length, the book presents a chronological narrative; at
the end, a brief epilogue deftly runs through the principal events in
Rostropovich's musical career after he left Russia, including his dramatic
return visits, which began with the cellist talking his way through
immigration to make his iconic solo performance outside the Moscow White
House during the siege of 1991. In the second half of her book, Wilson turns
from narrative to analysis, intercalating extended statements about the
maestro she has secured from six of his outstanding Russian pupils, some of
them her Conservatoire contemporaries: Natalya Shakhovskaya, Aleksandr
Knaifel, Natalya Gutman, Karine Georgian, Viktoria Yagling and Ivan
Monighetti. All in all, a considerable proportion of the text is made up of
translations of other people's Russian words. On the whole, the interviewees
use polite and abstract language characteristic of performers all over the
world when they speak on the record to outsiders: they accentuate the
positive and claim solidarity with each other, refraining from
technicalities and cattiness. Regrettably, though, the standard of
translation throughout leaves a good deal to be desired; while there are
relatively few gross errors, the language remains wooden even when
Rostropovich's own vivid Russian is being represented.
It is worth looking separately at the three categories mentioned in the
subtitle. Everything began from the first of them.
Rostropovich was indubitably one of the greatest instrumentalists to appear
since recordings enabled comparative judgements to be based on reliable
evidence. He was the son and pupil of an outstanding cellist. Wilson begins
with an extremely useful summary of the context of string-playing and
teaching from which Rostropovich senior emerged. He died prematurely in
1943, after which his son became the family's breadwinner.
(One would like to know whether the Soviet social and education system had
any real impact on the persistence of musical and other professional
dynasties, and whether there was any substantial difference in this regard
between the USSR and other countries; this book offers a lot of evidence on
this subject that cries out for judicious interpretation.) After a
professional debut at thirteen, Mstislav Leopoldovich amassed a huge amount
of varied performance experience. He won all the competitions open to him,
earned a gold medal from Moscow Conservatoire when he graduated in 1946, was
allowed to perform abroad in Soviet bloc countries ("ours") beginning in
1947, and elsewhere ("not ours") two years later. As if that and all the
ensuing international acclaim were not enough for one human being, from
early on Rostropovich was a piano accompanist of performance standard, and
before long was also working at the highest level as a conductor.
Rostropovich began teaching at his alma mater in 1948, was vouchsafed his
own class five years later, and carried on with it until 1974, somehow
fitting his lessons round his concert, recording and travel schedule; a
student could be called to class at any time of the day or night. The
accounts of his teaching methods and style yield some of the most memorable
passages in the book; pupil after pupil emphasizes the way Rostropovich
insistently taught not so much cello-playing -as often as not he worked from
the piano -as something much broader and more intangible: in the words of
Ivan Monighetti, "grandiose ideas, hypnotic images, profound spiritual
states of being". Apart from the supreme talent, staggering instrumental
mastery and personal magnetism of the teacher, the attraction of all this in
the context of official Marxism-Leninism can easily be imagined. His parting
words to Monighetti were: "Ivan, believe in God!". In terms of legendary
status, Rostropovich was, of course, one member of a titanic cohort of
Soviet instrumentalists whose rise and dominance matched that of the early
Sputniks. Wilson documents the partnerships with Richter, the Oistrakhs,
Kogan and Gillels in particular that by the early 1960s had captivated
audiences all over the world. Further lustre accrued from the cellist's
close personal relationships with the battered giants Prokofiev and
Shostakovich, whose compositions conceived specifically for him and
developed in consultation with him formed solid foundation stones in an
edifice that eventually numbered more than 200 works, transforming the cello
repertoire.
Composers outside Russia were soon contributing, most notable among them
Benjamin Britten. The most fascinating pages in the book concern these
creative partnerships, which all begin with delicate mutual soundings-out
and culminate in conspiratorial glee. The legend acquired another glittering
facet in 1955 with the whirlwind romance that began Rostropovich's enduring
domestic and musical partnership with Galina Vishnevskaya -whose
autobiography is as acerbic as Elizabeth Wilson's treatment of her husband
is emollient.
Apart from his talent, Rostropovich's success came about because, along with
the cello and piano, he played the system, and he was rewarded with all the
material perks and privileges it had to bestow. He never joined the Party,
but rubbed along with his permanent assistant at the Conservatoire, a
competent musician who was manifestly a KGB informer as well as a Party
member, and who managed that side of things -a complicity normal in the
day-to-day conduct of Soviet life at all levels. Such cheerful
accommodation, contrasting with the weary cynicism with which it was usually
performed, enabled Rostropovich to answer to the full the call of his talent
and personality and make the mighty efforts he did to be of service to his
country. He managed to retain his enthusiasm through years of gruelling
tours and teaching at home, ever-present jury service at the ferociously
intense instrumental competitions that had tempered his own professionalism,
and to keep on with the concert appearances and recordings abroad that
earned massive hard- currency fees, humiliatingly managed and punitively
taxed though they were by the State.
In the early 1970s Rostropovich came into irreconcilable conflict with the
authorities, one of that tiny minority among the creative intelligentsia it
is now comforting to think of as emblematic of a general alienation. The
immediate cause was extra musical: in 1968 he befriended a fellow Russian
patriot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in due course provided him with a home, and
resolutely stood by him when the writer joined his David and Goliath duel
with Party and State. Possessing a sense of personal dignity that matched
his musical talent, and no doubt also buttressed by the certainty that he
had powerful well-wishers and ready refuge abroad, Rostropovich refused to
turn his back on his friend, even though he was hung out to dry in the most
hurtful ways his masters could devise. The Party was unable to transcend the
ideological and political imperatives it had lived by through freeze and
thaw alike, no matter what the cost in human misery and international
prestige. When, after several more years of sclerotic blundering, Gorbachev
eventually impelled the system to make compromises, it did what nobody
predicted: collapsed, taking with it the Soviet performing arts that,
despite the ideological and bureaucratic succubus, constituted one of its
few incontestably positive achievements. I consider myself very lucky indeed
to have witnessed, on their fraught and unforgiving home turf, such
transcendental performances as Plisetskaya's Juliet, Smoktunovsky's Chatsky,
Vysotsky's Hamlet -and, for me the summit and epitome of all these
precarious miracles, Rostropovich's Shostakovich. |
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