Born in Baku (Azerbaijan) in March 1927, Mstislav Rostropovich is internationally regarded as the twentieth century´s most spirited virtuoso of the cello. In addition to his musical undertakings -as interpreter, director, 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. He is an honorary doctor of such universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Tel-Aviv, and Oxford, among many others, and he has received a multitude of awards.

As a result of Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he came into contact with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he supported morally and economically since then. 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, 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. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he directed a peace concert in this German city. In that same year, he once more performed in his country, after regaining his citizenship, in a concert presided over by Raisa Gorbachov and by Her Majesty the Queen Sofia. He currently offers an average of 30 charitable concerts per year, especially on behalf of the Bolshoi Theater and for the care of Russian children in a hospital that is dependent on the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation.

2007 Rostropovich was honored with the Order of Service to the Fatherland in Moscow.

Rostropovich died on April 27, 2007 in Moscow.