On Antoine Riboud’s private jet, they landed at Tempelhof Airport. Rostropovich played Bach’s Suites while sitting close to the former “Checkpoint Charlie” after managing to find a chair anywhere.
Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Mstislav Rostropovich after he sheltered Alexander Solzhenitsyn at his house, watched the fall of the wall on TV in his apartment in Paris. The BBC and other TV channels broadcast live. “I watched, drank and cried,” Rostropovich recalled of that night.
Then, at night, he has called friends. One of them, the French banker and entrepreneur Antoine Riboud, easily knocked out to fly to Berlin:
“As soon as I saw this cursed wall being broken, I said to my friend Antoine, who had his own plane,” Tomorrow I have to be in Berlin.” I grabbed the cello, and we flew.
I played and looked at the inspired faces of young Germans. Many were crying with happiness. And I could not resist.
This footage from November 1989, two days after the official fall of the Berlin Wall, shows Mstislav Rostropovich giving an impromptu performance of Bach’s cello suites at the Checkpoint C crossing point between East and West Berlin.
After all, this wall stood between the two worlds of my friends. Even for the Germans, this wall may have meant less than it did for Galya and me. What a joy it was to see that cursed Berlin Wall—the symbol of the two warring halves of the planet—crumbled to dust! This day on November 11, 1989, in Berlin became for me the greatest event since the victorious May 9, 1945. “
Shortly thereafter (at the beginning of 1990), Mstislav Leopoldovich spoke with a Deutsche Welle correspondent. In an interview, he tried to explain in two languages that on the day the wall fell, two torn halves of his own life had grown together: before and after exile. And a fundamentally new era began. “Will you become the Russian ambassador now?” The correspondent asked (apparently referring to the symbolic meaning of the word “ambassador”). “Well, probably not an ambassador,” the musician answered, not without irony. “But a good attaché!”
