Cello maestro Rostropovich dies, aged 80

Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Rostropovich. Photo: Eamonn McCabe
Mstislav Rostropovich, the master cellist who performed Bach suites beneath the Berlin wall as it crumbled, died today at the age of 80.

Rostropovich, considered to be one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, passed away in a Moscow hospital where he had been undergoing treatment for intestinal cancer.

"Rostropovich died today after a long illness," the cellist's spokeswoman said.

A Russian citizen, Rostropovich had been living in self-imposed exile in Paris until his health began to deteriorate earlier in the year.

His family arranged for him to be flown back to Russia, where he was visited in hospital by Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and later received the order of service to the fatherland .

For much of his adult life, the maestro had campaigned on behalf of Soviet dissidents - a persistence that eventually forced his family to flee Russia for Europe.

His opposition to Russia's communist leaders began with the Stalin era denunciations of his teachers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev.

During the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, sheltered the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote an open letter to the Soviet media protesting at the official vilification of the author. The letter was never published.

Known to his friends as Slava, Rostropovich was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world's greatest cellist.

He provided inspiration to a whole generation including Jacqueline du Pre, whom he taught.