Early Years
Rostropovich was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, USSR, to parents who had moved from Orenburg. Rostropovich was of mostly ethnic Russian ancestry; his father, Leopold Vitoldovich Rostropovich, was also partly of Polish noble descent. That part of his family bore the Bogorya coat of arms, which was located at the family palace in Skotniki, Masovian Voivodeship. He grew up in Baku and spent his youth there. During World War II his family moved back to Orenburg and then in 1943 to Moscow.
At the age of four, Rostropovich learned the piano with his mother, Sofiya Nikolaevna Fedotova, who was a concert pianist of Russian-Jewish heritage. He began the cello at the age of 10 with his father, who was a renowned cellist and former student of Pau Casals.
In 1943, at the age of 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied cello, piano, conducting and composition. His teachers included Dmitri Shostakovich. In 1945 he came to prominence as a cellist when he won the gold medal in the first ever Soviet Union competition for young musicians. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1948, and became professor of cello there in 1956.
Read more about this topic: Mstislav Rostropovich
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What a lesson here for our world. One blast, thousands of years of civilization wiped out.”
—Kurt Neumann (1906–1958)