Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist, conductor and champion of human rights who stood at the center of musical and international life for more than half a century, died Friday of cancer at a Moscow hospital. He was 80.
Rostropovich was hospitalized in February with an unspecified illness, but seemed to have recovered somewhat in subsequent weeks. He reportedly appeared frail at an 80th birthday party hosted last month at the Kremlin by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rostropovich, known to friends and fans alike by the nickname Slava, was one of the three or four greatest cellists of the 20th century, a fearless virtuoso who played with extraordinary accuracy, tonal power and expressive fervor. But he was much more.
He also was an intimate friend and muse of many of the leading composers of the age. Among the composers who wrote music inspired by his genius were Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Bernstein, Witold Lutoslawski and Alfred Schnittke.
He was a conductor of power and eloquence, especially in the music of composers he had known well. As a pianist, he was a dexterous recital accompanist for his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. He taught generations of cellists, from Jacqueline Du Pré to Han-Na Chang.
In addition to his stature as a performing artist, Rostropovich was a leading figure in the struggle for human rights within the Soviet Union. As a result of his outspokenness -- including his vocal support for the dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- Rostropovich's ability to travel was restricted. He left Russia in 1974 and remained in exile until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Finally, he was that rarity in the world of the arts, a deeply benevolent and beloved figure who inspired not only admiration but affection from colleagues and listeners alike.
A warm and witty figure, Rostropovich was willing, for example, to don tutu and tights for a surprise appearance as the "ballerina" Natasha Milanova Rostropovich at a 1990 birthday celebration in Stern Grove for violinist Isaac Stern.
San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, who collaborated frequently with Rostropovich over the years, said Friday that his death left "one of those big empty spaces" in the music landscape.
"With such a colossal figure, it's difficult to know where to start," he said by phone from Miami, where he was rehearsing with the New World Symphony. "The tremendous influence he had on cello playing and on the repertoire -- because of all the composers he worked with -- was just extraordinary. During the '60s and '70s, these new pieces were all emerging so quickly, it seemed like every couple of weeks there was another piece.
"(Cellist Gregor) Piatigorsky used to say, 'You know, I get so tired of hearing Slava play those same 39 concertos.'
"As a colleague," Thomas went on, "he was so strong and so clear that you had to hold your ground with him, especially at the beginning. By the time I met him, he had already begun doing some conducting, and it was like, 'I'm going to play the cello, but also conduct the performance, and I'll conduct it using you' -- which was not what I wanted. So we had to work it out, and we did work it out.
"He was warm, he was wily, he used to give everyone bear hugs and big wet kisses and say, 'My belooooved!'
"And he was tireless. I can't remember a time Slava took a vacation -- he always had some new project. He was a phenomenon, what can you say?"
David Finckel, cellist with the Emerson String Quartet and co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Music@Menlo, studied with Rostropovich. In an interview last month with the Associated Press, he said that Rostropovich "picked up from where (Pablo) Casals left off in terms of popularizing the instrument as a solo instrument.
"People like Casals and (Emanuel) Feuermann brought the cello to a soloistic visibility. But Slava was the one who really provided the repertoire, particularly the repertoire of his time for us to play. (After hearing him play) I always had the same reaction: I just wanted to run home and pick up my cello. There was nothing about it that was intimidating. He was only ever encouraging, just by his presence."
Rostropovich made his first San Francisco appearance in 1956, playing Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto -- one of the many cello works written for him -- with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Enrique Jordá.
The response was rapturous. "Rostropovich is one of the most amazing cellists of modern times," music critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote in The Chronicle. "He possesses a colossal technique and has not the slightest inhibition about displaying it. What is more important, he has a fiery, temperamental, immensely exhilarating kind of musicianship."
Rostropovich made his U.S. conducting debut at the San Francisco Opera in 1975, leading a production of Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades" with Vishnevskaya as Lisa. Controversy ensued when General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, enraged by the negative review by critic Stephanie von Buchau in the Pacific Sun, retaliated by striking her from the company's press list.
That was Rostropovich's only appearance at the Opera, but he appeared frequently in Davies Symphony Hall, both with the Symphony and at the helm of the National Symphony, where he was music director from 1977 to 1994.
In 1998, he performed Dvorák's Cello Concerto with Thomas and the Symphony in a single sold-out performance, lavishing his interpretive gifts on a score he had performed countless times and making it sound intense and fresh. Last year, he led the Symphony in two weeks of music by Shostakovich in honor of the composer's centennial.
Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku, the capital of what was then the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The family was musical, and as a child, he studied piano with his mother and cello with his father.
He entered the Moscow Conservatory at 16, where he became acquainted with Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. His early years brought a stream of recognition and acclaim, including victories at several international competitions and a Stalin Prize in 1951.
Prokofiev, worn down near the end of his life by ill health and the repeated persecutions of the Soviet regime, found inspiration in the buoyant skills of the young virtuoso and revised his Cello Concerto for him. Shostakovich wrote his First Cello Concerto for him in 1959.
Perhaps Rostropovich's most productive artistic friendship was with Benjamin Britten, whom he met in 1960 when he performed the Shostakovich in London. In the decade-and-a-half before his death in 1976, Britten composed his Cello Sonata, Cello Symphony and the three Suites for Unaccompanied Cello -- all mainstays of the modern cello repertoire -- for Rostropovich.
Meanwhile, Rostropovich was developing as a conductor, beginning with a 1968 production of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. But he also was coming into conflict with Soviet authorities.
He was a public supporter of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lived with him for four years, and a critic of restrictions on cultural freedom. One of his last appearances in Russia during this period was at a 1973 Moscow performance of the Dvorák Cello Concerto with Seiji Ozawa and the touring San Francisco Symphony. He and Vishnevskaya went into exile in 1974 and were stripped of their citizenship four years later.
Settling in the West, Rostropovich became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and a regular guest conductor with the London Philharmonic, and he recorded prolifically. In 1989, he performed Bach during the demolition of the Berlin Wall.
He remained a prominent figure in the fields of human rights and philanthropy, both individually and through the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation, which supports health care initiatives for children in the former Soviet Union. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Olga and Elena.
For all his involvement with the political struggles of his era, Rostropovich remained an artist first and foremost.
"Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music," he said in a 1999 interview with The Chronicle. "But maybe soon, maybe finally we can feel free just to love music."
E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.
Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, performing at the White House on September 17, 1978.
Azerbaijan-born cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (nicknamed ''Slava'', Russian for glory) has passed yesterday at age 80, after having been admitted to a Moscow hospital in February this year, allegedly for intestinal cancer. The exact cause of death however has not been released. His coffin has been put in the Moscow Conservatory today, and many prominent and thousands of other Russians came to salute him. The cello player only died four days after his friend Boris Yeltsin.

Rostropovich was not only considered to be one of the best cellists in the world, but he also was a symbol of the resistance to the Soviet regime. In 1970, he provided shelter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writings alerted the world to the Gulag system of forced labour camps in the Soviet Union. Because of his support for dissidents, Rostropovich fell in disgrace and lost his citizenship in 1978. He was restored during the perestroika reforms.

Rostropovich conducted the U.S. National Symphony Orchestra from 1977 to 1994. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered him the First Degree in the Order of Service to the Fatherland for his "outstanding contribution to the development of world music and many years of creative activity."

President Putin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, French PM Dominique de Villepin and others have already expressed their regrets about the loss of Rostropovich. De Villepin brought to memory Rostropovich's performance at the Berlin Wall during it's fall, an image globally broadcasted which earned him international fame.