Mstislav Rostropovich, widely considered to be one of the greatest cellists of the twentieth century, died on Friday at the age of 80. According to reports, the Russian musician had been suffering from intestinal cancer in the last year. Rostropovich's body has been lying in state at Moscow's music conservatory and has been attended by thousands of mourners, amongst them Russian president Vladimir Putin, who gave his condolences to the cellist's widow, opera star Galina Vishnevskayam, and left a bouquet of dark red roses by the coffin.
Rostropovich was born in Azerbaijan, then part of the Russian Federation, in 1927. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1943 to 1948 and became a professor there in 1956. Over the years he became famed for his interpretations of the work of Dvorak and Haydn, but also had music specially written for him by the likes of Prokofiev, Britten and Bernstein. He received around fifty awards during his lifetime, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance, the Polar Music Prize and the Gold Medal from the Royal Philharmonic Society.
The cellist also became known for his dissidence during the communist era, writing an open letter to newspaper Pravda in 1974 which led to his being hounded by soviet authorities. Rostropovich fled the country and settled in the US with his wife and children, and his Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1978 because of his public criticism of Russian restrictions on cultural freedom. He returned in 1991 to support the also recently deceased Boris Yeltsin in his fight against a Soviet military coup months before the final disintegration of the Soviet Union.