How extraordinary that the most life-affirming and ebullient virtuoso of modern times should have emerged out of the repressive madhouse of Stalin’s Soviet Union. That is the first miracle about Mstislav Rostropovich, who died yesterday. But it’s the first of many. There’s also, of course, the miracle of his cello playing. I first experienced it as a schoolboy, in what is still the most highly charged concert I have ever attended. It was August 1968. Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague that day. And, to his evident shame, Rostropovich was billed to perform with the USSR Symphony Orchestra at the Proms.

Outside the Albert Hall, the ever-indignant Tariq Ali whipped up a huge protest rally. He needn’t have bothered. Rostropovich made the most telling protest with his cello. By a stroke of irony, he was playing the Czech composer Dvorák. He turned that concerto into a requiem – for a crushed nation; for freedom and decency; and, as it turned out, for his own career within the Soviet Union. On that turbulent night he also revealed to a callow 14-year-old the limitless power of music to say the deep, dark things that people cannot (or dare not) say with words.

Six years later, in Cambridge, I had another encounter with his playing. In the intervening years he had acted with reckless bravery inside Russia. (That is another miracle: that he spoke out, and survived.) He had invited the ostracised Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to live in his dacha; then, with unbelievable insouciance, fired off a letter to Pravda to denounce the harassment of Andrei Sakharov. Blacklisted in Russia and forbidden from playing abroad, he was, he later told me, close to suicide – not because of the persecution, but because he was deprived of his raison d’être: his supreme gift for communicating through music.

In despair, he and his wife, the flame-haired Bolshoi soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (possibly the only person in Russia with a personality as vast as his), fled to Britain, where they were given temporary refuge in a Cambridge college. And in the serene darkness of King’s chapel on a cold February evening, I heard that sublime timbre again – the voice of Rostropovich’s cello, this time playing Bach as a thanksgiving to his English friends. Fifteen years later he would play Bach in thanksgiving again – amid the rubble of the newly demolished Berlin Wall.

But it was a later encounter with his playing that brought home to me another of his miraculous traits – his astonishing energy. To mark his 60th birthday, he came to London and played a dozen 20th-century cello concertos in a single fortnight. Few virtuosi would have dared even to contemplate such a task. None would have infused the music with such white-hot intensity. But what made the feat so remarkable was that every note had been written for him. No other performer in history has inspired so many composers. The cellist joked that he stopped counting the premieres after the first 150.

That protean energy spilt over into many areas, particularly later in life when he seemed to be making up for years lost in the Soviet wilderness. Surviving on four hours’ sleep a night, he charged between six homes round the globe. When his cello playing waned, he flung himself into conducting – idiosyncratically, sometimes indecipherably, but usually inspirationally. He became a peerless interpreter of his close friends Shostakovich and Prokofiev, largely because he knew better than anyone alive the political turmoil out of which their work had sprung.

And he continued to intervene forcefully in Russian affairs. In 1991 he rushed back to Moscow to join Boris Yeltsin in the besieged White House – a tubby 64-year-old theatrically brandishing an automatic gun that he had no idea how to use, convinced (rightly) that antiYeltsin forces would not dare to attack while he was inside. Later, he launched excoriating broadsides against the oligarchs of 21st-century Moscow, and established a medical charity to relieve suffering among Russia’s poorest children, tweaking the consciences of adoring American fans to raise the necessary millions.

But perhaps the greatest miracle was his gift for friendship. He must have bestowed his famous bear-hug on thousands – me among them. We first met on the day after my first child was born. Someone had told Slava this, and he hugged me like a brother. “Your son now he cellist become!” he exclaimed in his spectacularly mangled English.

He was no prophet (my son became a rock guitarist). But this instinct to empathise with another’s joys or woes was the key to his personality. It was also what made him such a superb musical interpreter. The mystery is how this quintessential love of humanity survived the inhumanities of Stalinism. I can only think that, like Beethoven, he had the sort of indomitable personality that isn’t crushed by persecution, but feeds off it. “My philosophy may sound strange,” he told me. “But I believe that if I did not have so many difficult moments in my life I would not be so happy now.”

One wouldn’t wish the Soviet Union on anyone. But it’s a curious fact that most of today’s star performers seem so hopelessly bland when compared with past giants who endured the tyrannies of Hitler or Stalin. Perhaps, as the French say, you must suffer to be truly beautiful. But the music from Rostropovich’s cello wasn’t just beautiful. It was a transcendental message of hope, surging and irresistible, from one soul to another – his to yours. If I live to be 100, I don’t expect to hear another sound that touches me so deeply.

Mstislav Rostropovich obituary

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