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A Palette for Life
You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.
Mstislav Rostropovich
I often say that there are not six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on our planet. There is only one.
When I was in college, I had the privilege of studying literature and music in arguably one of the greatest European centers of culture, Vienna, Austria. The Cold War still raged, but its precipitous decline was nigh. It felt dangerous living on the edge of the Soviet Empire, a mere two hours by bus from many Eastern Bloc capital cities.
Every morning, I would walk from my flat through Heldenplatz, the square below the Hofburg Imperial Palace balcony where on March 7, 1938, Hitler declared the unification of his homeland, Austria, with Germany. I would seethe each time I passed the balcony.
The raving crowds were no more, though. Widows who had survived the war, walked their Dachshunds past the balcony without looking up, and headed into the park, where by May each year the heady fragrance of lilac filled one’s nostrils. Vienna was, and is, many intractable contradictions.
I took one of my music classes at the Palais Kinsky, which was adjacent the University of Vienna. One icy winter morning, the class was abuzz with the news that Mstislav Rostropovich, known affectionately as “Slava”—one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century—was in residence in the Palace.
Taking residence in a palace was a world away from the suffering the Rostropovich family endured when Slava was a child. By the age of 21, he was a musician, and continued to suffer.
In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.
Decades of increasing restrictions at the hands of the Soviet leadership followed because of Rostropovich’s outspoken commitment to human rights and his protection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents. With unrelenting restrictions placed on his ability to perform in the Soviet Union, he left Russia in 1974, only months after Solzhenitsyn was banished to West Germany.
After leaving Russia, Rostropovich was free to travel unrestricted and to play his music once again. Thus, it was that he took residence in Vienna one winter. I recall one day, our professor lecturing on Beethoven, paused, mid-sentence, because across the courtyard we could hear the melancholy cry of a cello. None of us spoke. We simply basked in the soul-stirring music that surrounded us.
Truly, to this day, no words can capture the experience, and so I invite you to listen to Rostropovich play the Dvorák Concerto in B minor Op. 104.
On another winter day, I was leaving the Palace by a back staircase. As I descended, I could see Rostropovich below me, ascending. Dressed in a heavy winter coat and ushanka, a Russian fur hat, he approached me.
As he passed, I intentionally brushed against his shoulder with mine.
I was but a girl, but something in me understood that I did so because I wished to touch greatness.
Entschuldigung, pardon me, I uttered in German, as he passed.
Ah, the impulsivity of youth. Would I do the same today as a woman of a certain age? I do not know. What I do know is that the creator, the composer in me was only then being born, and I sought my palette.
You know, creators, composers need a palette for life, a color for life, Rostropovich said.
And then he completed the thought:
If he is only happy with his life, I think that he doesn’t fully understand what happiness means. Only after that [suffering] do you understand what happiness is.
During and following that year in Vienna, suffering of many sorts continued to be a part of the palette of my life. My childhood friend, Franklin, died in a freak snowstorm on Mount Whitney during spring break. My parents, who met me at the airport in late summer, left in separate cars. Walking to baggage claim with my father and siblings, I learned they were divorcing. The man I loved, had hoped to marry one day, and who wrote eloquent letters for the entirety of my absence abroad, declared he was moving on.
The sweet and the bittersweet. The point and the counterpoint. The dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis became the three movements of my concerto. And today, the multifaceted palette of my life is as singular as a piece by Dvořák.
Yours for a palette for life,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth C. Orozco Reilly
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