THE ROSTROPOVICH-VISHNEVSKAYA COLLECTION OF RUSSIAN ART THE ROSTROPOVICH-VISHNEVSKAYA
COLLECTION OF RUSSIAN ART TO BE OFFERED FOR SALE AT SOTHEBY’S LONDON
have had the privilege to handle, and it comes to auction at a landmark moment in the
evolution of the international market for Russian Art.”
Mstislav Rostropovich
The celebrated musician Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) was one of the greatest cellists and conductors
of the 20th century. Born in Azerbaijan, Rostropovich was taught to play the piano at the age of four by his
mother and the cello at the age of eight by his father, a former student of Pablo Casals. He debuted in 1942 in
the Ukraine playing a Saint-Saens Concerto and entered the Moscow Conservatory the following year when
he was 16 studying cello as well as composition. In 1945 he won the Soviet national competition for young
musicians. Dmitri Shostakovich – who later became a dear friend of both Mstislav and Galina – and Sergei
Prokofiev both taught him. In 1955, he married Galina Vishnevskaya, the renowned soprano at the Bolshoi
Theatre. Throughout the 1950s he toured widely outside the Soviet Union, making his American debut at
Carnegie Hall in 1956, the same year he won a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory. Rostropovich’s
debut as conductor took place at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1968 in Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. The
artist’s championship of human rights and opposition to censorship in the arts, made him famous throughout
the Western world and in 1974 resulted in his family’s emigration. In 1978 the Soviet government revoked
Rostropovich’s citizenship and that of Galina Vishnevskaya. His Russian citizenship was eventually reinstated
in 1990. Before Rostropovich passed away in April this year, President Vladimir Putin awarded him with the
Order of Service to the Fatherland.
Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya
The eminent soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, was born in 1926 in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) and made
her operatic her debut in 1944. In 1952 she won a competition held by the Bolshoi in Moscow whose
company she joined the following year. She and her husband Mstislav often performed together, perhaps
most memorably when they made a recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Awarded the Order of Lenin, Vishnevskaya was named the ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’ in 1966. Her
operatic career, which took her to the world’s greatest opera houses including La Scala, the Royal Opera
House and the Metropolitan Opera, concluded in 1982. Her most famous recordings include Britten’s War
Requiem (with Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; 1963), Puccini’s Tosca (1976) and Prokofiev’s War and
Peace (1986). Ms Vishnevskaya published her autobiography Galina: A Russian Story, opened an opera theatre –
Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre – in Moscow in 2002, and also starred in a film, Alexandra, by Alexander
Sokurov, which was shown at The Cannes Film Festival in 2007.
Maestro Rostropovich and Madame Vishnevskaya worked with many of the great composers of the twentieth
century, including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whose two cello concertos were written for Rostropovich,
and Britten: the cello suites and Cello Symphony were written for Rostropovich and the War Requiem was
composed for Madame Vishnevskaya. Although she was
