Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

My first two personal meetings with Rostropovich took place in Moscow (1958) and around that same time here in Berlin, where I attended his local début at a time when virtually nobody here had ever even heard his name. I had originally discovered him purely by accident, during my first visit to Prague, which had taken me from Munich, where I then lived, to the “Prague Spring”, the first-rate international music festival unique in that it brought together individual eastern and western artists with orchestras in constellations possible nowhere else, due to contractual recording obligations and the “Iron Curtain”. Slava - virtually everybody called him Slava - had won first prize in an international cello competition a few years earlier in Prague - a city special to him in more ways than one, since there, for one reason or another, he married the outstanding Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya - and that triumph had moved Supraphon, the state-owned Czech label, to record him in the Dvorák concerto with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by the legendary Vaclav Talich. That wonderful recording electrified me, and from then on I reacted immediately to any mention of his name.

In 1956 I moved from Munich to Berlin, and I reacted in similar galvanized fashion when I spotted a mention in an East Berlin newspaper that he would appear as soloist one Sunday morning with the orchestra of the Komische Oper, where the pit band (as in all three Berlin opera houses) had its own concert series as a full-fledged symphony orchestra. I immediately telephoned Eberhard Finke, the Berlin Philharmonic’s First Cellist - who also had never even heard his name - and lined up him and his wife Rosemarie to take over to East Berlin with me.

When we three went to Slava after the concert, it pleased him visibly, for aside from the inevitable one or two Soviet Embassy representatives, nobody seemed to take any particular interest in him. Almost rhetorically I asked whether he had plans for lunch; that seemed also to please him, and he seemed delighted by the prospect of talking music with such a group, which for him, as a rigidly isolated Soviet citizen only shortly after the death of Stalin, must have seemed exotic indeed.

The Berlin wall still lay several years in the Cold War future, so I asked whether he’d like to lunch over in West Berlin - another immediate hit with him. Berlin, already almost hermetically divided but still a four-power city, offered accredited correspondents like me all kinds of creature-comfort advantages, among them admission to the three Western Allies’ Officers’ Clubs, where one could eat fairly royally for a comparative pittance. Naturally the French offered the noblest cuisine, also the most appealing setting - a former yacht-club building out on Tegel Lake in the far reaches of northwestern Berlin - and the enthusiastic look on Slava’s exceedingly expressive face immediately made that the destination I decided on.

Today, about half a century later, anyone who didn’t experience the Cold War can scarcely imagine the multifold ramifications of it in that era’s Berlin. Slava’s brief Berlin stay also encompassed a recital at the official Amerika Haus by a Brazilian cellist I myself had never heard of, and Slava reacted with alacrity at my mention of it. In my comparative political naïveté‚ it never even occurred to me that the KGB in the opulent Soviet Embassy over on East Berlin’s Unter den Linden boulevard would require Slava to keep them totally informed about his Berlin activities, and it took me completely by surprise when I received word that, by clear implication, Slava couldn’t attend that American-sponsored recital except in company with Embassy representatives - who in turn, for exquisite protocol reasons, couldn’t attend without an official invitation from the Amerika Haus administration. Clearly the Russians had to consider even the remote possibility that such a move, even though it came from totally unofficial me, might conceivably indicate some subtle kind of minuscule change in Washington’s Cold War policy. It still stuns me to recall that when I responded to a subsequent call from the American Political Affairs Officer who’d got wind of this exchange, he had the effrontery to ask me: “Whose side are you on, Paul?”

Anyway, Slava’s East German gigs that trip included a concert with the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he would perform the German premiere of the brand-new concerto Dmitri Shostakovich had composed for him in 1959. He raved about it - Slava almost congenitally raved about almost everything - and said Eberhard and Rosemarie Finke and I really must come down to Leipzig to hear it; that meant a comparatively trifling 112-mile drive, but one requiring an East German visa and twice entailing unpredictable border controls that could go on sadistically long. To our collective astonishment, Slava simply instructed his East German management to take care of those tiresome bureaucratic details for his three friends, and the morning of the concert found the Finkes and me on our way to Leipzig in my car.

That trip revealed to me the automobile-freak aspect of Slava’s intricate personality. His management had provided him not only with an expert interpreter (a Frau Golde, who not long afterwards checked in with the Finkes and me after having paid people-smugglers to transport her - at enormous risk and usurious expense - from East Germany into West), but also an eight-passenger Soviet Zim driven by an easy-going, likeable Berliner named Werner. At one point, when Werner left our group alone for only a minute or two, Slava joyously slipped behind the wheel and took us on a brief personal spin around downtown Leipzig, just to get the feel of a Soviet limousine-class car he obviously had never driven. That unauthorized take-over could have cost poor Werner dearly, but by that time he had his own indulgent picture of his high-spirited charge, and since nothing had in fact gone amiss, he took it in stride.

At that time, the upper Soviet crust regarded ownership of a western car, ANY western car, as an especially desirable status symbol, and Slava boasted to us that in Moscow he owned an Opel Rekord - in fact a West German model almost in the modest Volkswagen class, but I kept that detail to myself. (I’ll never forget seeing David Oistrakh drive up before the Moscow Conservatory one day at the wheel of his own definitely eastern Moskvich, looking as if he occupied both front seats of that minuscule Soviet vehicle.) Western automobiles also functioned as blatant bribes to the most desirable of the star Soviet musicians; when France’s Pathé-Marconi, naturally using language less crass, asked the great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter what gift he would fancy in exchange for his consenting to make a Parisian recording for them, he asked for and got a snazzy Citroën DS-19 - the only one in Moscow except for the French Ambassador’s, whose chauffeur had to take care of Richter’s.

Slava confided to me a totally unrealistic fantasy he harbored with regard to his little Opel. As I recall, Soviet Customs officials slapped a 400% tax on such western “luxury” items, and Slava said he wanted to drive his Opel to West Berlin to get every single bit of that vehicle replaced with new parts, leaving intact only the small bit of metal engraved with that particular Rekord’s serial number. As he fancied it, since Soviet Customs would have recorded that when he left the country, he could dodge that 400% gouge by triumphantly pointing to that metal proof that he had driven back into the USSR the same vehicle he had driven out.

Rostropovich showed genuine delight over having met so distinguished a German colleague as Eberhard Finke, but he found his German given name too exotic and unfamiliar for him, so on the spot Eberhard became, for Slava, Ebi - rather disconcertingly pronounced Abie. With his customary ebullience he gave Ebi Finke an impromptu coaching lesson about a technical bow-arm discovery he had recently hit upon. I cannot reproduce insider details, but fundamentally it had to do with utilizing the weight of the bow-arm itself to extract as much musical sound as possible from the strings bowed. Eberhard Finke, as First Solo Cellist of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic’s not exactly accustomed to make-up instruction, took that little seminar in good grace, and that encounter also laid the foundation of a lasting friendship, renewed every time Slava appeared with that orchestra, which in time he also repeatedly recorded with at Herbert von Karajan’s invitation.

Slava’s path and mine crossed on so many occasions, in several European countries, both east and west - on one Middle-Eastern occasion even in Lebanon, where he also received some sort of governmental decoration. (When I expressed surprise at that, a Baalbek Festival insider told me in confidential tones: “We got word in advance that he likes that sort of thing” - and he did indeed have a fairly vast collection of such gewgaws.) In Warsaw, during one of its annual “Warsaw Autumn” festivals of contemporary music, I heard him play one of the several hundred large-scale works written expressly for him, a concerto by young Boris Tchaikovsky - a piece meanwhile mercifully forgotten, but at that time for ebullient Slava “one of the most important modern cello concertos.” During that festival, when I went into the Hotel Bristol’s dining room for an early lunch and came upon Slava alone there, our table chitchat included his next travel plans. From Warsaw he would fly to London, but via Copenhagen. When I asked about that unorthodox routing, he told me his beloved wife Galya had a fondness for Danish porcelain, so he equipped himself with dollar Travellers’ Checks and at the Copenhagen airport’s tax-free shop placed a whopping order he nonchalantly charged the people there with getting shipped to Moscow.

Also for me, Prague had unique significance in my years of friendship with Slava. The end of the 1950s, I had discovered Sviatoslav Richter’s mother (after he himself had for pragmatic reasons told me both his parents had died much earlier) not only very much alive but also living in WEST Germany, and restored mother-son contact for the first time in 20 years or so, thus acquiring me a unique position in Richter’s personal sphere. In Moscow Richter made it an annual custom to invite to his and Nina’s Moscow flat - extravagantly spacious, by Moscow standards even almost luxurious - his erstwhile fellow piano students from the Moscow Conservatory class of Heinrich Neuhaus, a polyglot who had imported to Moscow the piano school of the great Polish pianist Theodor Leschetizky, with whom he had studied in Vienna, and since one of my several Moscow sojourns included that annual dinner, Richter kindly invited me as the only outsider.

When I had arrived for that Moscow visit, one of my first telephone calls went to the Rostropoviches’ private number. A female voice - presumably Galya’s - almost immediately snarled at me, with maximum hostility, “Alyo!” My asking for Slava brought an even more savage volley of rapid-fire Russian, far too difficult for my Texan ears, at the end of which her hanging up severed the connection, leaving me totally baffled. That night, by coincidence the occasion of that annual Neuhaus dinner at Richter’s, one topic dominated the entire evening: the Moscow daily paper which had an official monopoly for such legal announcements had that morning published a fine-print announcement that Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich had filed suit for divorce from Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya.

One of the guests present thought he had the explanation. Slava, who had a substantial international reputation as a lady’s man, had got wind that Galya, during a guest engagement at La Scala in Milan, had made extracurricular music with her tenor opposite number - whereupon Slava had simply blown apart. My Soviet companions pointed out that under ordinary circumstances the parties involved had no say as to the publication date of such announcements, and obviously that devil Rostropovich had pulled high-echelon strings to have that bombshell appear the very morning Galya’s plane back from Italy would arrive in Moscow - where at the airport she would look in vain for the cavalier who habitually awaited her there.

When I told them about my telephone misadventure that morning, they said her telephone must have started ringing almost off the hook as soon as that newspaper had appeared, with her answering it in the vain hope that each call might cast some palliative light on Slava’s unprecedented defection. One fellow guest scored one of the evening’s biggest malicious laughs with the observation that for this divorce hearing - by law open to the public - they might have to rent Moscow’s huge Lenin Stadium to accommodate the crowd.

And yet, the next time I went back to the Prague Spring Festival after that and checked into the Hotel Esplanade, where most of the festival’s biggest names stayed, whom should I almost immediately run into in the lobby but Slava - together with Galya, and without the slightest indication of what might have happened since my most recent Moscow visit. I literally out-sat Galya, determined to placate my curiosity. Slava didn’t go into details, but he did lean towards me and say, in a confidential tone, “You know, probably the smartest thing I ever did. Ever since then, I have lived in a paradise!”

My most memorable encounter with Slava provided one highlight of a dream assignment a German magazine gave me to spend three weeks travelling to three major European festivals with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the mezzo-soprano Nina Dorliac, whom everyone regarded during their lifetimes as his lawfully wedded wife. By previous telephone arrangement between Berlin and Moscow, we agreed to meet at a London hotel and thence proceed to our first stop, the Edinburgh Festival. Lord Harewood, the only really musical member of the royal Windsor family, had become director of that festival, and that year he had triumphantly landed Richter (also a Slava) for three unique appearances: a solo recital (highlighted at Harewood’s request by Schubert’s big posthumous Sonata in B-flat), a mad marathon programming of all five Beethoven sonatas for cello and piano, and Richter’s first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s concerto-like Capriccio, conducted by Lorin Maazel, one of the few conductors Richter would appear with.

When I found no Richters at our designated Kensington hotel, I immediately telephoned Nina at home in Moscow, who told me Slava had become ill, and would I please inform Maazel, also the London manager Victor Hochhauser, that they would have to arrive late in Edinburgh. (Richter not infrequently cancelled on last-minute notice; only as time passed and I became more familiar with internal family matters did it become clear that he probably suffered from the variety of depression psychiatrists classify as psychotic. In Moscow in 1958 he himself had told me that he sometimes went “for months” without even touching a piano - behavior so abnormal that only bouts of severe mental illness could probably explain it.) As Nina requested, I laid the bad news first on Maazel, whom it hardly surprised, since he obviously knew Richter’s erratic reputation, for he took it with resignation. When I then told Hochhauser, he almost yelled at me: “You shouldn’t have done that!” Those Edinburgh days threw me repeatedly together with Hochhauser; we did not become friends, but his far more personable wife Lillian did smoothly function as the pourer of oil on troubled waters.

At Hochhauser’s forceful request I broke the bad news to no one else, for he told me Lord Harewood might well have a stroke since he had made those three Richter dates the highest points of that year’s entire festival. In due time Hochhauser reported back that Maazel’s own calendar made it impossible to reschedule the orchestral concert, but that they had found an open afternoon for Richter to play his recital at 4, and the Beethoven marathon would have to begin at 10.30 p.m. on another evening. That last became the only musical event in my experience which sprawled over two days, with two intermissions, ending at 2 a.m. (During the second intermission Rudolf Serkin came backstage to apologize to the two artists for simply having to leave, but he had to get his rest before his own Festival obligation the next day - actually later of what had become that same day.)

The day of that late-night Beethoven bash, the two Slavas plus Nina Dorliac, Lillian Hochhauser, and I lunched together, and Rostropovich - as he almost invariably did, quite spontaneously - almost totally dominated the situation. It swiftly became clear to me that Richter, himself thoroughly accustomed to the spotlight customary for and taken for granted by stars, did not exactly relish that competition from even such an old and beloved friend as Rostropovich. (During their Conservatory days, when they had had no choice but to submit to the Party-dictated course - even at the Conservatory - in Marxist-Leninist “Dialectical Materialism”, a.k.a. Dyamat, they had used to study that hated textbook together in a pragmatic way: taking turns reading it to each other, prone on their backs on the floor with the book held directly overhead, each one reading until fatigue dropped the book down onto the reader’s face, at which point the other sufferer would take over.) After lunch we repaired to the Usher Hall so the sonata partners could accustom themselves to the acoustics awaiting them late that evening. Never before had I seen Richter so glum, so completely out of sorts, downright grumpy.

Rostropovich laced into the music as if not even a 20-ton tank could have deterred him. Richter merely went along, dutifully, almost unenthusiastically. Ominous stasis prevailed until the scherzo movement of one of the sonatas - I forget which one - and then came one of the most masterful, delectable pieces of musical clownerie of my entire long life. The music actually scampered, and both Slavas scampered along with it, actually going faster than Beethoven required or might even have personally approved. That run-through almost immediately turned into a neck-and-neck race, and with technical virtuosos of that caliber it made even the highest wind seem sluggish. Only very, very gradually, with maximum musical subtlety, did the friskier of the two make his tactic clear: Rostropovich subtly began a diminuendo of volume-level one had to listen to attentively for quite a while became that gambit became completely clear.

Richter, himself one of the subtlest of musicians, before long twigged to the prank his old friend had decided to play on him, and counteracted in kind, with the most gradual imaginable diminuendo on the piano - probably even more difficult technically on the piano keyboard than on the cello. Both those cut-ups flew along with totally dead-pan faces, neither of them giving even the slightest indication of their extra-musical infusion of mischief. It will surprise no one that Rostropovich finally topped his less fanciful partner after both had dropped to a pianississimo level of volume, combined with vivacississimo celerity. Finally Rostropovich - continuing to bow as before, and with a mien as conscientiously serious as ever, in fact completely raised his bow from the strings, ceasing even its slightest contact, diminishing that scherzo into mere dumbshow. When that happened, Richter did finally react - and he cracked up completely. Both laughed themselves silly over their reciprocal prank, and from that point on the rest of their acoustical rehearsal sent swimmingly - as did their actual concert late that night.

I last saw Rostropovich in Spain, when Pau Casals’ widow and her second husband Eugene Istomin (who had become a lifelong friend of mine at the first Casals Festival in the French Catalonian Pyrenees in 1950) invited me to fly down from Berlin, in acknowledgement of the first photoreportage of my life, which had brought me to the attention of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson at Magnum Photos; Marta and Eugene kindly called it the best such photographic coverage anyone had made of Casals. Rostropovich (who off-handedly referred to the Spanish royal couple’s son as Juanito) had automatically become a featured artist on that occasion, and he and Istomin teamed up for an unforgettable performance of the Rachmaninoff Sonata. It touched me recently to see Queen Sofia on television in Moscow paying personal tribute to Slava at his funeral.

At the small gathering after that Rachmaninoff, Slava told me he had to leave the following morning for his next obligation. Nonetheless, when he momentarily lapsed into Russian for our customary valedictory, my unconscious’s wishful thinking took command over known reality and I heard myself saying: “Da zavtra!”, Russian for ­¡Hasta mañana!

“Until tomorrow”, we both said. To my infinite regret, that mañana never came, and now never will.