DEDICATION TO MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH

This terrible news is unbelievable. No-one could bear this thought, despite his wasting disease or how he looked at his recent 80th birthday celebrations. Everyone knew that his illness was incurable, but did not believe it. They saw it, but could not believe their eyes because the maestro knew how to surprise people, and to revive himself. He could revive and start everything again, as he did, for example, at 47 in bitter exile. He staged performances in the best opera theatres of the world, carried out large-scale vaccination campaigns, set up a Shostakovich museum and organized and headed festivals and competitions, including of the works of Azerbaijani composers.

He empathized with everything and everyone and knew how to be at the key moments of history. He played Bach on the ruins of the Berlin Wall ("he saw them knocking down the wall and rushed to get there," his wife said) and literally risked his life during the coup attempt in Russia, spending all three days under siege - not for nothing was the victory over the coup later called "a revolution with Rostropovich's face". He flew without a visa and with his cello, preparing to be killed. "I have written a farewell letter to Galya: 'Sorry, I know that you will not see me any more,' and have left it on the bed." He was also very friendly with "the unreliable" and with those who are not honoured today: it was Rostropovich who opened the door to Solzhenitsyn when he was in disgrace. The friendship between Solzhenitsyn and Rostropovich was called a "high grade friendship".

He landed in the Arctic and a Siberian village with his cello, performed crazy concerts on virgin soil. He always acted as though he thought he would not have time. He was afraid to take a break. "A man with an engine inside," people said of him. And it was no exaggeration: up to 200 concerts in one season - no-one had managed to do it before! And if he liked the audience, he could say "Let me play for you again," and would play another concert! After talking to Rostropovich, many people abroad changed their attitude to the USSR.

The talented musician was not always eccentric. I will never forget my meeting with him when the maestro came to Baku to hold a Shostakovich festival. He did not look very well then, and I remember that when I saw what I did not expect to see, my heart ached. He was very pale and drank tea from a small pear-shaped glass - quite light tea, and asked for hotter tea from time to time. "I am not allowed to take anything else yet," he told me with a guilty smile, happily saying: "See how lucky I am - you are both a journalist and musician. This does not always happen. Let's talk as long as we can!" This was not really an interview, but a conversation between two Bakuvians. As if he was one of my best friends whom I had known for a hundred years. It seemed that if you touched him, you would be immersed in the epoch of Chaplin and Hemingway, Prokofiev and Picasso, as well as Salvador Dali and Mark Chagall who painted his portraits. Despite all this, there was no arrogance. Between us there was no impenetrable fence of status.

Then there was an interview which was published in the local press on the same day - a 30-minute conversation with Rostropovich turned into a well-written publication. And then, there was one of the happiest days of my life. When I ran into the office of the director of the Philharmonic Hall with a big one-page article in my hand to see the maestro, seven minutes were left to his performance. I knew that I was committing sacrilege and that you cannot disturb him just before a concert: this is a moment of the highest concentration and it is almost a sin to disturb him now! The secretary even said with round eyes: "You won't do it, will you?!" I repent.

He was sitting at a table at the far end of a softly-lit hall, scribbling something in the music in front of him. An unusually white outfit, a wax-like face and a gentle look that seemed to have forgiven everyone.

A glow. God, who did he remind me of? The similarity was so great that I recoiled and did not dare to enter the room. Later I realized that I was not wrong - Pope John Paul II. He saw me. The Pope was not there any more. But there was boyish happiness for both. And it seemed he was happier to see me than the article.

Ten minutes later, he went on to the stage in his dress suit. He was to storm Shostakovich's ninth symphony. "A painter needs encouragement like the bow needs rosin." Maybe the Germans who invented this aphorism are right, although the word "encouragement" sounds funny and offensive in this case. I wish I was at least a comma in his biography.

They say that the maestro was crying on the plane, reading my "Dedication" that had not yet been published. Only a few pages. Firangiz Alizada said that she gave him this article.

He had had surgery before his unforgettable trip to Baku for the Shostakovich celebrations. "I desperately need to hold the festival here in Baku, as I promised Shostakovich. And then I can do it in the rest of the world. But it should start here. I have to." He was in a hurry - as if he was paying off his debts. And he left without debts. He left us with an endless debt and endless repentance.

He went to see the children of Beslan and visited refugee camps - we all remember that terrible report which showed the maestro crying on seeing that sight.  An abyss of sorrow and injustice! What attracted the well-to-do and famous maestro to living drama in its harshest form?

He loved to visit Baku for no reason. "I have come to Baku, my beloved homeland. I am happy to be in this land again," this is how Rostropovich started his visit here. He participated in Music Day on 18 September. He brought vaccines for Azerbaijani children. He was happy: "The reason for this visit is that we vaccinated 750,000 children, and I am happy that, in this way, I have expressed my love and thanks to the wonderful country - Azerbaijan." Yes, there was always a reason, just like there was time in the schedule of the much discussed tours of "Unstoppable Slava".

There was a sad farewell ceremony. We all remember the Sarabande from Bach's Suite No 2 which he played. This was a performance dedicated to the memory of his true friend, unforgettable Heydar Aliyev, a man who, as he told me, "returned his homeland to him".

I love to visit the Rostropovich museum in what used to be Kolodeznaya Street. There is a special visible memory in these cool rooms. I "see" a boy with inquisitive eyes, I "hear" the not entirely harmonious sounds of a cello in hands that lack confidence.

"In the hands of Rostropovich, music becomes a moral force, and every concert a transcendental event," The Chicago Tribune wrote about him. Despite his success, he had no pathos about himself. Genius is a tragic side of talent. He really knew what it was like. But he was not badgered or tired at all. He really liked jokes and told me that he loves making up jokes, blocs of jokes and tales about musicians that would be difficult to forget coupled with the inexhaustible mischief of their story-teller and actor. Playful and joking. Even his death is perceived as another joke by the maestro.

He kept joking during our meeting and sought (and found!) a reason to smile, but there was some tragic element in his looks. I gradually discovered details of quite a different plot.

"He saw everything" - there are few people about whom you can say this. Did his dreams come true? An affirmative answer suggests itself, however. Great people have different criteria and a different dream which does not match what we have in our minds as people-in-the-street. There is probably something he did not manage to do, for example, to get Rachmaninov's grand piano - and he worshipped Rachmaninov - out of the lake. Rachmaninov was from Ivanovka, and there is a legend that peasants on the estate seized Rachmaninov's grand piano and threw it in a lake in a fit of revolutionary anger. "I would give my life to get it out of there," Rostropovich once said.

You can seldom meet people who can really surprise you. He was cataclysmic, his art had an incredible power of catharsis - I am talking about his emotional power to influence people. After meeting such people, you are steadily drawn into their sphere of attitudes and principles, into a spontaneous and stringent system of traditions and laws that they have created and that you will use as a guide for a long time - maybe for all your life. I know it from my own experience. He remained in the memory of history not only for his phenomenal performing skills, but also for his rare courage - only very few people can leave at the height of their fame - to leave as a cello soloist. Yes, he gave his last concert in Vienna at the height of his fame. "After Vienna, I said to myself: 'Slava, close your cello case, it is enough. I realized that I will never play better." This was his last solo concert.

He disproved a lot of things, for example, the postulate about the private life of a genius. He lived publicly all the time - without the solitude that creative people so desperately need. More surprises too. For example, why did Mikhail Gorbachev, even at the very height of perestroika, not congratulate him on his 60th birthday, whereas a slogan like "Rostropovich is America's glory!" was heard in a foreign land? He was called "an alien", a "suicide", "a space cyclone". They say that you have to die so that epithets do not sound false. As long as the genius lives among us, it is difficult to believe that he is a genius. Rostropovich disproved this completely, making the enemies of the people choke in a pot of fury. "I forgave them all," he told me then. "And I became really happy!"

I also remember the glow in his eyes when he told me about his first meeting with Uzeyir-bay (Hacibayov) - a friend and companion of his father - and about his distant childhood. This was endlessly interesting - to listen to his monologues with a lot of breaks and lyrical deviations full of philosophical ideas, sacral searches and subtexts with many meanings. And there was also a joke that lit up his strict face - these momentary changes from fun to something sad and even tragic, and the other way round. Perhaps, he had a different view of life because of his age: everything seems funny at a distance, although it was a real tragedy in the past. As for the minuses of a situation, when you are not like everyone, they are fatal.

Yes, he knew, as nobody else, both the storms of fate and its pressure. When he left his homeland in those terrible years, he was exiled and went out into the world. He became its "Citizen"! But that was a different level of popularity - not the one when fans grab your sleeves and try to tear your buttons off. He proved that you can conquer the world without shocking anyone or using a fancy outfit. In his hands, music became a pantheon of all arts. This wide world outlook, a real "Renaissance" scope of human culture, made Rostropovich more than a cellist, it made him a teacher of music.

This is when a concert stops being a concert in the normal understanding of the word and turns into an act of ritual worship of God. Not for nothing does London's Times call him "the greatest of the modern-day musicians".

Mega-feelings, mega-intellect and a mega-gift. We live in a country of disappearing monuments. I say this with pain and inner resistance. Rostropovich was, alas, one of the last Mohicans of the modern period.

People need beacons to find their bearings - in order to reach for something in reality - not idols and little gods that have overpopulated our star-lit skies. There are many who sing, compose and write, but they cannot conquer the world with their talent. This requires a different scale.

Rostropovich was a cult figure of the 20th century, one of the few spiritual leaders of his time. With all this, he did not have that line behind which cultural nature ends and image starts, because he never ran out of the former and probably never had the latter. He was always himself, remaining indifferent to entourage. Without admiring himself, he ridiculed stupidity and arrogance, boastfulness and pride, cowardice and treason, and those who stood out too much trying to prove to the world that they are irreplaceable and those who were famous for their popularity. His art was to talk to himself and to the world and you cannot be insincere in this.

The appearance of a genius does not depend on conditions, time or environment. This is the business of other organizations and spheres - God's light simply falls on some soul.

Is one man capable of changing the world? Yes, he is, if this man is Mstislav Rostropovich.