Rostropovich was born in 1927 in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan, on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. As a child he studied piano with his mother and cello with his father, who was a former student of Pablo Casals. Rostropovich came up through the Soviet conservatory system, counting among his teachers Prokofiev and Shostakovich, with whom he would retain close ties. He began winning cello prizes right and left in 1945, and within 10 years he was a figure of international interest.

Rostropovich married prominent Bolshoi soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, played a significant role in shaping Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto into its final form, got Shostakovich to write his First Cello Concerto (which almost immediately became a repertory staple), and concertized and recorded freely in the West through the 1960s.

But from 1969, Rostropovich began sheltering and speaking out on behalf of dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In retaliation, Soviet authorities limited Rostropovich’s appearances to small towns in Siberia. Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya finally obtained exit visas in 1974 and moved west.

The Soviets revoked their citizenship in 1978.

From the mid-1970s, Rostropovich devoted increasing time to conducting, something he had initially done mainly for his wife’s Russian opera productions. He served as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., from 1977 to 1994, thereafter working with the group as its conductor laureate. Meanwhile, post-Soviet Russia welcomed him back and restored his citizenship. Indeed, Rostropovich was ultimately recognized as a Russian national hero—during one of his final hospital stays, he was visited by no less than President Vladimir Putin.

Rostropovich succumbed to cancer just weeks after celebrating his 80th birthday.

“His position in music history and cello history is amazing and profound,” declares cellist Terry King, who teaches at the Hartt and Longy schools of music.

As a teenager in California, King was something of a Rostropovich groupie, following him on his West Coast concert tours and visiting him backstage.

“I had never heard such powerful cello playing in my life,” says King. The youngster was not too starstruck to notice that Rostropovich’s technique for improving his Boris Badenov-style English was reading comic books before recitals.

However casual Rostropovich’s pre-concert demeanor may have been, he was never lackadaisical in his musical preparation. “He would play sonatas from memory,” says King. “He didn’t get lost very often, but once I saw him get lost in the Strauss sonata. He just did a fabulous improvisation in the Strauss style until he found his place.

“I never heard anyone with such mastery of the upper half of the bow. I’ll never forget in the Grieg sonata, there was a set of triplets where he was right at the tip, and I thought the bow would break from the power of those triplets. The leverage and strength he used there were eye-opening for me. And there was his mastery of the powerful slow bow, without it becoming ugly or raspy, always keeping those overtones in the sound.”