by Ann Wroe
Brother Roger offered, to anyone who wanted it, a way to the spirit of the risen Christ through light, music and silence. The services he devised at Taizé were often held by candlelight. The music, based on ancient mantras but developed by him, was simple melodic phrases sung over and over again until they became a meditation, sometimes continuing under and through the prayers in what he called “a pillar of fire”. In between these chants would come long spells of silence when, as Brother Roger put it, “with a childlike trust, we let Christ pray silently within us.”
Listening, rather than preaching, was the essence of Taizé. Christian leaderswould have done well to imitate that secret. As it was, churches all over the Christian world borrowed the Taizé songs. Fame forced Brother Roger to worry about copyright and piracy; it also gave him critics. For some he was too Catholic, allowing masses and observing the Marian feasts. For others he was too timid, championing the oppressed but disbanding branches of his order when they became politically violent. Brother Roger ignored all this. Moral and political reform, he believed, would come only when bitterness and resentment vanished from human hearts.
He was attending the evening service when a deranged woman cut his throat, killing him almost instantly. He died in the midst of the reviving music he had brought to Christianity. Had anyone asked why, he would have gently reminded them that he did not leave a silence that was empty.
Mstislav Rostropovich
“Slava” Rostropovich, the world’s greatest cellist, died on April 27th 2007, aged 80
MUSIC, under totalitarianism, was one of the great escapes. The most vicious secret policeman could not wholly curb the human spirit once it moved into the world of sounds. “Slava” Rostropovich (the diminutive of his Christian name means “glory” in Russian) used to the utmost the freedom that music gave him inside the Soviet Union. When forced to move abroad, he became the ambassador of free Russian culture to the world, doing in music what Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, more gloomily, in words.
He was present at the two defining moments of the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 (when he played Bach suites all night by a breach between the concrete blocks), and the attempted hardline putsch in Moscow in August 1991. On that occasion he talked his way into the Soviet Union without a visa to stand, rifle gingerly in hand, with Boris Yeltsin in the besieged Russian parliament. Its defenders claimed his presence stopped the putschists storming the building. He would have been happy to die there, he said, on the “most important, dangerous and emotional day of my life”.
In the 17 years before that, apart from one visit with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, he had not set foot in his own country. His defiance began when his two greatest teachers, Sergei Prokofiev and, chiefly, Dmitri Shostakovich, fell out of official favour. A cannier Soviet citizen might have dumped or denounced them, but Mr Rostropovich refused to do so. For a time, his glittering musical talents protected him. Other artists and intellectuals, however, were silent in his defence, and his friendship with Mr Solzhenitsyn was the last straw. In 1969 the writer, persecuted by the authorities, had nowhere to live; Mr Rostropovich invited him to stay. Then he, his wife Galina and some other brave souls wrote an open letter to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, protesting at the regime’s abuse of cultural freedom.
After that, Mr Rostropovich was on the blacklist. He became a prisoner in his own country, ignored by the state-controlled media, unable to play in public or make recordings. He was stripped of his musical awards, and his name was even removed from the many scores that had been dedicated to him. Though Russia was “in my heart – in my mind”, and ever would be, in 1974 he asked to be allowed to leave. His citizenship was revoked four years later.
He had been adored in the West since his first visit in 1956, frequently performing at the Aldeburgh festival and becoming close friends with its towering talent, Benjamin Britten. The two communicated in broken German, which they called “Aldeburgh Deutsch”; Britten wrote cello suites, a sonata and a symphony for him. In exile Mr Rostropovich learnt English, or at least developed an idiosyncratic version of it. But he lost none of his Russianness, greeting friends with a massive bear hug. After Britten died, Mr Rostropovich would hug his tomb when visiting Aldeburgh.
Off-duty, he was an assiduous socialite. In London, Washington or Paris he was glad to mix with the appreciative, anything in stockings and (especially, jealous critics said) the famous. But his main energies went to music. He would rise at five, study scores for three hours, relax after a concert with a four-hour practice session. Such discipline had been inculcated from childhood, when he had studied the cello with his father at their home in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan. At 13, he would hang flatbread from the ceiling-lamp so that he could snatch swaying mouthfuls as he played. And when, as a young man, he thought he might be allowed to premiere Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, he practised for ten hours a day.
He played the piano too – his first instrument, on which he had beencoached by his mother from the age of four – and was accomplished enough to accompany his wife, a soprano, in her recitals. He conducted, though his sessions had a mixed press: sometimes clumsy and lacking in fireworks, sometimes inspirational, with an unmatched ability to communicate his profound understanding of the music to the orchestra. When contemporary composers played through their pieces for him, he said, he would watch their faces, and try to pass their feelings on.
As a performer, he combined extraordinary technical virtuosity with a sublimely confident and passionate interpretation of the music’s melodic line. His sound was as huge as his humanity. When his interpretations departed a bit from the printed score, few complained: the music was enriched, not merely transmitted, through his playing. He had fallen in love with the cello in the first place, he explained, because it seemed to be his own voice. But the music he heard in his head as he played was “symphonic”, far surpassing even the sound of the instrument he embraced.
Perhaps his most memorable performance was of Dvorak’s cello concerto, in London in September 1968, just after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring. Protesters outside the Royal Albert Hall were cross that a “Soviet” concert was going ahead. But Mr Rostropovich wept for his country’s crimes and its captives’ suffering, and so did those who heard him.
Miriam Rothschild
Dame Miriam Rothschild, a scientist of the old style, died on January 20th 2005, aged 96
IN A typically generous moment, Miriam Rothschild once named a flea after a writer on The Economist. He had fortuitously helped to discover a new one on a zoological expedition in Africa. The gesture was probably the highest honour she could bestow on anyone.
She thought fleas beautiful. Gazing at their stained sections through the microscope, she once said, gave her a feeling as ecstatic as smoking cannabis. In her bedroom she kept them in cellophane bags, in order not to miss a thing that they were doing. She had discovered, by watching thousands of them jump, that they were actually adapted for flight, and that the jumping flea developed an acceleration on take-off 20 times that of a moon rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. A lifelong atheist, she admitted that she had been tempted to believe in a creator when she discovered that the flea had a penis.
Her fascination had begun young, on holiday in Transylvania, when her father had allowed her to help him catch fleas from a mouse. Already, in the sprawling Rothschild family seat where she was brought up and informally schooled, Miriam had a collection of ladybirds and butterflies, the butterflies pinned on card by herself. But her father was a flea man. He and her uncle Walter had already established, at Tring in Hertfordshire, the largest private natural history collection in Britain: 200,000 birds’ eggs, 300,000 bird skins, 144 giant tortoises that wandered in the grounds, more than 2m butterflies, and plenty of fleas. These included 12 dressed fleas from Mexico, with a couple garbed like a bride and groom.
Her father’s obsession with f
leas, however, was not a dilettante enthusiasm, but a serious scientific interest. He had identified the flea that carries plague, Xenopsylla cheopis Rothschild, and had written more than 150 papers on the creatures. His daughter followed him into the depths of parasitology. It was not a glamorous field. As she noted ruefully in her book “Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos”, a popular study of parasitism, “Birds’ fleas and feather lice do not sing. Nor do they fly about flashing brilliantly coloured wings in the sunshine ... The collectors of fleas and lice can be counted on the fingers of one hand!” Yet she loved them. Her life’s work, which took 30 years and filled six volumes, was to catalogue her father’s collection.
Nor did she stop there. As a passionate enthusiast for all living creatures (except some irritating humans), she produced more than 300 scientific papers over the years. She did special research into a parasite that lived only in the eyelashes of hippopotami. She studied the behaviour of black-headed gulls, buying gull-eggs in Leadenhall market in order to incubate them herself and put them in her aviary. During the second world war she tracked the role of wood pigeons in transmitting TB to cattle and, as she lurked in the fields with her crate of birds, was once taken for a German spy. She discovered that monarch butterflies absorbed toxins from milkweed in order to use them, as the plant did, for defence. She was most fascinated by the role of pyrazines, or aromas, in the lives of insects, pointing out that each species of butterflies and moths had its own distinctive scent. The smell of a very gently squeezed ladybird, she once said, “will stay
on your hands for days”.
As the years passed, this passionate scientist, who had never taken a degree and lived most of the time on the farm where she had been born, accumulated eight honorary doctorates. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society and of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. These honours were not always given without grumbles from the men in the labs. In an age of intense specialisation and professionalism in science, she appeared as a happy amateur and generalist. She was, in fact, a throwback to a different age, when gentlemen of means (and the Rothschilds had plenty of those) set up their own home laboratories and cabinets of curiosities, and pursued science for the sheer joy of it.
She also had a view of science that was unashamedly broad, taking in arts, literature and natural philosophy – much in the mould of Erasmus Darwin at the end of the 18th century, whose tomes on botany and zoology were written in enthusiastic verse. Very early, she was a part of the environmental movement and an exponent of the “web of life” theory, in which all species in an area dependon each other and on the preservation of habitat. Visitors to her farm in Northamptonshire found it a riot of weeds and wild flowers, a style she impressed on the Prince of Wales at Highgrove. She herself moved through the gardens like a ship in full sail, dressed in her favourite purple or sea-green gowns. Since she had eschewed leather on principle (together with meat and alcohol), she would sometimes wear white wellingtons for evening.
Perhaps the most pleasing image of her, though, was the one that appeared in the Latin citation for her honorary degree from Oxford in 1968. “She has come to this our Capitol”, it read, “not by degrees, but by one leap as of her fleas, in a triumphal chariot ... drawn not by Venus’s doves, Juno’s peacocks, Alexander’s gryphons or Pompey’s elephants, but by her sixty-odd species of avian parasites.”
Tiny Rowland
Roland Walter (Tiny) Rowland, capitalism’s outsider, died on July 24th 1998, aged 80
Hunting around for something not too brutal to say about Tiny Rowland now that he is dead, those who knew him have remarked on his charm. The English language is helpful with the evasive word. So, he was charming, if you like, but was he not ruthless? Yes, comes the response, he could be. What about his private life? A long and happy marriage and a liking for Siamese cats. Was he a crook? Some have said he was. But much that has been written about his life is based on hearsay, has the feeling of myth and is uncheckable. Undoubtedly he cut corners, pushed to the limits of the law, but was not, probably, a crook.
Charming and ruthless men are a theme in British business: not enough of them, some would say. What was it about Mr Rowland that made him loathed by many in the community of commerce, that made him say, defensively, “You can never have enough enemies”?
In a sense he was a born outsider. His father was German, a trader working in British India. In 1917, when the first world war, and British patriotism, was at its height, father and mother were in a fairly disgusting detention camp in Simla. That was the birthplace of Tiny, the affectionate nickname given to the strapping baby and which he kept all his life: “Tiny” was the simple signature on his business letters.
After the war the family settled in Hamburg. Tiny was enrolled, like most German boys, as a member of the Hitler Youth. Although the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Tiny looked the perfect example of the master race, it seems unlikely that he had Nazi sympathies. Rather the opposite: in 1939 he was jailed for two months for befriending critics of Hitler. The family was allowed into Britain as refugees, but when war broke out Tiny’s parents were again detained, this time in the Isle of Man.
Tiny changed his name from Fuhrhop to Rowland and joined the British army as a medical orderly. He was discharged after disclosing that a brother was in the German army. He got a job first as a porter then as a waiter. When peace came, he worked for a time, as far as is known, as a door to door salesman. This was his rock-bottom start as a businessman.
For a young man seeking his fortune after the war, Africa was the place to be. Much of it was still British, and pre-war British at that. Mr Rowland seems to have been welcomed in what was Southern Rhodesia as a fellow white who spoke with a decent upper-class accent. He did well, acquiring a farm, mining interests and the Mercedes dealership (helped by his fluent German). In 1963 he became head of Lonrho, short for the London and Rhodesian Gold Mining Company, a moribund firm he built into a major corporation with annual sales of around $8 billion. At its peak, by the late 1980s, Lonrho was running some 600 companies in 50 countries. It was Africa’s largest food producer. Tiny Rowland got on well with Africans. His own humble beginnings may even have given him a rapport with the dispossessed.
It also has to be said that, in furtherance of business, he dispensed generous bribes to leaders of newly independent black countries. Money, he believed, probably correctly, could buy almost anything. Donald Trelford, a former editor of the
Observer, a venerable Sunday newspaper that Mr Rowland bought and used as his publicity sheet, wrote this week that he introduced the tycoon to Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion. Mr Rowland told him, “If you can introduce me to the man who makes all the decisions about plutonium in Russia, I’ll transfer £1m to any bank you nominate.”
Did he mean it? Was there such a plutonium king in Russia? It does not matter. There was a vulgar streak in Tiny Rowland that upset other charming and ruthless tycoons who feared that he was giving money-making a bad name. He had an awesome temper and a waspish way with words. Calling non-executive directors “Christmas tree decorations” was impolite, even if true. His efforts to prise Harrods store from another less-than-popular tycoon, Mohamed al-Fayed, gaveentertainment to millions but in the financial establishment was seen as an unseemly public brawl.
The City of London cheered in 1973 when eight directors of Lonrho tried to get rid of Tiny Rowland, saying he was unfit to run a public company. Mr Rowland survived but suffered a body blow when the then Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, said that his activities were “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism”. It was Mr Rowland’s bad luck that he was the target of one of Sir Edward’s few memorable phrases, and one that was continually used against him. Still, it was not personal attacks that scuppered Tiny Rowland, but the judgment of the market. In 1991 Lonrho hit a bad patch. A loan from Colonel Qaddafi of Libya was not much help (and did Tiny much personal harm). In 1995 he was removed from the company by his fellow directors. Had he been younger he might have o
utwitted the rebels, but at 78 some of the old fire had gone. He went home to play with his cats.
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon, artificial intelligence pioneer, died on February 9th 2001, aged 84
The story goes that one day Herbert Simon announced to a group of his students that he and some of his colleagues had invented a “thinking machine”. He said it was equal, and perhaps superior, to the human brain.
The idea of such a marvellous machine had been around for centuries. René Descartes (1596–1650), whose philosophy was bound up with mathematics, wondered whether a machine could be made to think; but generally the notion was considered as unlikely as turning iron into gold, another fantasy that occupied great minds. Now here was Mr Simon disturbing his class on a sleepy afternoon in Chicago in 1957 with his improbable claim for computers.
At that time the computer was chiefly famous for having been invented by the British to decode enemy messages in the second world war. High-tech in the world at large was not much more than the electric typewriter. But for several years Mr Simon had been examining whether a computer could match the process of human thought. As a test, he showed that a computer could quickly provide a proof of theorems in Principia Mathematica, a key 20th-century work on logical theory. Bertrand Russell, one of the book’s authors, said a trifle testily that he wished he had known what “can now be done by machinery” before he had “wasted ten years doing it by hand”.
But can artificial intelligence, AI as insiders call it, really be dignified with, well, “intelligence”? Is this what Descartes had in mind when he wrote, “I think, therefore I am”? A machine will deliver a bar of chocolate in return for a coin, provided it is working, but not even a child believes it is a thinking instrument. A computer is a machine, however intricate. Is it no more than a number cruncher? For more than 40 years Mr Simon was regularly interrogated about his claim that there was little difference between a suitably programmed computer and the human brain’s use of neurons. He usually answered questions with good grace, but he refused to give ground.
