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The Kronberg cello festival in Germany, like any gathering of skilled laborers, affords congregants a chance to swap notes on craft: in this case, new strings and rosin, drills for thumb position, double stops and staccato at the frog. But this year's festival, which ran Oct. 3-7, was different. The absence of the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who co-founded the biennial event in 1993 and died in April aged 80, left its participants pondering his legacy and celebrating the unexpectedly prominent role he and his instrument had played in the history of the 20th century.

Rostropovich went by the nickname "Slava," meaning glory — or, in the translation preferred by the American composer Leonard Bernstein, "possessed by the gods." I knew Slava through my father, Lynn Harrell, who belongs to a generation of cellists that inherited an instrument Rostropovich had changed forever. My memory of our meetings is of Slava's effusive affection: from bear hugs to damp kisses on both cheeks. Everyone he met — hotel workers, the Emperor of Japan, even the Pope — left with wet cheeks. Both with and without his instrument, it seemed, it was his goal to touch as many people as possible.

The cello, best known for a series of unaccompanied suites by Bach, is the orchestra's most solitary instrument. It is also one of the most intimate, a result of its proximity in range and expression to the human voice, and also the posture of its player, which is one of embrace. In Rostropovich's hands, this potent mixture of the familiar and the solitary turned the cello into an instrument of dissent, embodying the lone, heroic voice in its 20th century struggle against oppression.

Particularly in the cello concertos of Dmitri Shostakovich and Witold Lutoslawski, written for Rostropovich, he set his instrument in conflict with the orchestra, a doomed but determined voice in a struggle against the collective. But no matter how isolated he seemed on stage, Rostropovich was not without an ensemble; his allegiance was with the audience, which responded instinctively in support. "I give people music and beauty," he once said. "In exchange they give me love and recognition."

Sometimes, the struggle against authority was literal. On Aug. 21, 1968, the day Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, Rostropovich played with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra in London. Watched by hovering KGB minders — "Sputniks," the musicians privately called them — he was greeted by shouts of protest. But his performance of the mournful, defiant concerto by the Czech composer Antonín Dvorák brought the hall to a comprehending silence. "As I played, I saw the dead in the Prague streets through my tears," he later said.

Exiled to the West in 1974, Rostropovich earned mass admiration, and a king's fortune. When he became music director of America's National Symphony Orchestra three years later, TIME put him on its cover, branding him, with cold-war gusto, "Washington's greatest new monument." But he always maintained a refugee's yearning for his homeland, and this only intensified the pathos of his playing. His Paris apartment was a veritable Hermitage of Russian artifacts, and even after he was stripped of his citizenship, he proudly described himself as Russian, an allegiance he affirmed by flying to Moscow earlier this year when he learned that he was dying.

Thoughts of belonging and legacy were prevalent among the 24 cello soloists, 98 cello students and countless music lovers gathered in Kronberg. Every cellist knows deep down that no matter how alive their instrument seems in their hands, it will return at their passing to its dormant state: a wooden box with four strings. Most agreed that Rostropovich's greatest legacy was his ability to cajole and inspire the major composers of the century to write for the cello. In total, there are said to be 132 compositions that owe their existence to his enthusiastic suggestion, a figure evident in the many scores lying around studios and practice rooms in Kronberg with the inscription "To Mstislav Rostropovich" under the title.

Other than these bequests, what will remain of Rostropovich? Will his heroic playing be remembered as a cause of history or a futile response to it? Rostropovich famously performed an impromptu solo at the Berlin Wall in 1989, but he did not make it fall. He played with searing passion in London in 1968, but the tanks rolled on Prague regardless. Songbirds can't bring the dawn; they can only endure the darkness until it ends.

As I settled into my seat for the festival's Rostropovich Memorial Concert, I thought how sad it was that death had succeeded even where the Soviet hammer had failed, in silencing this seemingly indomitable voice. But then there was the sound of the cello again, that warm and human sound, as the soloist poured forth on the stage, and it was as if Slava were there once more because every cheek in the house was wet, and at this moment, a moment he would have loved, it was enough to know that in his playing, and forever in his instrument, there was so much music and beauty.

• EBEN HARRELL/KRONBERG
• A cello festival celebrates the life and legacy of the musical giant Mstislav Rostropovich