The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Mstislav Rostropovich
Born in Baku (Azerbaijan) in 1927, Mstislav Rostropovich has been internationally regarded as the twentieth-century’s most brilliant virtuoso of the cello. In addition to his musical undertakings, as interpreter, conductor and creative impulse for composers, he also stands out as one of the maximum defenders of human rights in the world.
After beginning his musical training at the age of four, he enrolled in the Conservatory of Moscow at age eight and gave his first concert at fifteen. As a result of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he came into contact with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he subsequently supported both morally and financially. He became a defender of human rights in his country and, as a consequence, became the object of persecution. Winner of the International League’s Award for Human Rights in 1974, that same year he vowed never to play again in his country until there was complete cultural freedom, for which he and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, were stripped of their Soviet citizenship in 1978.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he conducted a peace concert in this German city. In that same year and after regaining citizenship, he returned to perform in his country at a concert presided over by H.M. Queen Sofia of Spain and Raisa Gorbachov. He was awarded 41 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford and Tel-Aviv, among others. He received numerous distinctions, including the German Order of Merit, the Gold Medal the Royal Philharmonic Society, the Lenin Prize, the annual award of the International League of Human Rights and was named Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He was appointed a Commander by Number of the Royal Order of Carlos III in 2004 and was awarded the Russian Order of Merit in 2007. He was also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.
Rostropovich died on 27th April, 2007 in Moscow.
Yehudi Menuhin
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York in 1916. The son of Jewish emigrants from Russia, he obtained British citizenship in 1985 (he also holds the title of Lord). He revealed himself as a prodigious violinist at an extremely early age, giving his first public concert in San Francisco when he was only five years old. Student of some of the foremost maestros of the violin, he debuted in Paris at the age of ten, in New York at the age of eleven, and shortly thereafter in Berlin. He refused to visit Germany in 1934 on the grounds of his Jewishness, while calling for the exiling of other Jewish musicians to be annulled, and in 1935 he undertook his first world tour. During World War II, he gave more than 500 concerts for the Red Cross and the Allied Forces. After the war, he performed in Germany in 1947 and in Moscow in 1950 and was responsible for the intercultural exchange programme between the USA and the USSR in 1955.
In addition to his career as violinist, he has also conducted orchestras. Moreover, he made a significant contribution to the growth of the teaching of music through the creation of two important schools in Great Britain and Switzerland. A prominent activist for human rights, he gave benefit concerts around the world for numerous causes. Lord Yehudi Menuhin was also known for his collection of more than 30 violins, as well as for his books: “The Violin”, “The Music of Man”, “Violin and Viola”, among others.
Winner of the Yawahasjal Nehru Award (1970), holder of the gold medal from Spain’s General Association of Authors and Editors (1995) and Grand Cross of the Order of Civil Merit of Spain (1995), among many other honours and distinctions, he also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Toronto, among others.
He died in Berlin on 12th March, 1999.
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