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There was no reply. It was time to get out of the country.
In 1974 Rostropovich was denied permission to participate in a BBC program honoring Shostakovich. In a fury, he told a Western journalist that the Soviet authorities had imposed an "artistic quarantine" on him and Galina.
Friends in the U.S. read that as a cry for help. Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia asked Senator Edward Kennedy to intercede.
Visiting Moscow in April, Kennedy saw Brezhnev and asked him to permit Slava to perform in America. Shortly thereafter, the Rostropovich family was given passports. In 1974 Slava went to Harvard to receive an honorary degree. There he saw Felicia, threw himself to his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. To show his gratitude to the Kennedy family, Rostropovich offered to train their son Teddy in the cello.
As luck would have it, young Teddy is not musical; touched as he was by the gesture, he declined with thanks.
Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Slava and his family were not expelled from the Soviet Union. They are still on the Kremlin's leash; they are required to renew their passports once a year at a Soviet embassy. But as far as most Russians are concerned, the two are nobodies. Galina's name is nowhere to be found in the Bolshoi Opera's special 200th anniversary commemorative book. Slava's entry in the latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia runs a meager twelve lines. The Soviet press continues to ignore his work abroad, in fear, says Slava, that other musicians might be encouraged to leave the country—or at least to demand greater artistic freedom at home.
Meanwhile, Rostropovich and his family are enjoying their new freedom and fresh celebrity. In addition to the dacha and the Moscow apartment, they keep flats in Paris and New York and one near Lausanne. Olga, 20, and Elena, 19, are studying at Manhattan's Juilliard School. Galina sang Tosca last week at Covent Garden. Friends report that her life with Slava is often tempestuous, partly because his career is rising and hers is fading; after all, Rostropovich was largely responsible for destroying her position at the Bolshoi. While Galina supported her husband's defense of Solzhenitsyn, she feels that Slava's friends sometimes take advantage of him. "He is a man who must be handled with love, yes, but also with brain," she says emphatically. "In music his intuition is never false, but in human relationships he is very often mistaken because he wants to love everybody and not everybody loves him."
If that is so, few people have noticed it, least of all Slava. In many ways, he is a changed man. For one thing, he has discovered money. He has learned that big names are marketable. ("His command of English is not flawless," says a colleague, "but numbers he understands.") He now receives $15,000 for a cello recital, and his N.S.O. salary, though not publicly disclosed, runs upwards of $100,000 a year, which puts him into the top ranks, with the likes of Sir Georg Solti. He is generous with his time and talent. Once he flew from New York to Los Angeles and back in one day to spend a few hours with a sick friend. He donates proceeds of some concerts to charity, eagerly gives benefit performances.