The Cellist at the Crumbling Wall

On November 11, 1989, two days after the Berlin Wall began to fall, Mstislav Rostropovich — the great Russian cellist who had been exiled from the Soviet Union for sheltering dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — grabbed his cello, boarded a plane to Berlin, and sat down on a simple chair beside the crumbling concrete. He played Bach. Suite No. 2 in D Minor.…