Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch performs in Paris June 19, 1994. Rostropovich has died, his spokeswoman Natalia Dollezhal said. Rostropovich had been hospitalized in February for an undisclosed illness and looked frail at his 80th birthday celebration late last month. AP File Photo

MOSCOW - Mstislav Rostropovich played the cello with grace and verve - and lived his life offstage the same way. His death at age 80 takes away one of modern Russia's most compelling figures, admired both for his musical mastery and his defiance of Soviet repression.

Rostropovich stirred souls with playing that was both intense and seemingly effortless. He fought for the rights of Soviet-era dissidents and later triumphantly played Bach suites below the crumbling Berlin Wall. In his last public appearance, at his birthday celebration in the Kremlin on March 27, Rostropovich was frail but still able to show his capacity for joy and generosity.

“I feel myself the happiest man in the world,” he said. “I will be even more happy if this evening will be pleasant for you.”

Spokeswoman Natalia Dollezhal confirmed Rostropovich's death, but would not immediately give details. The composer, who returned to Russia last month after years of living in Paris, had suffered from intestinal cancer.

After a funeral in Christ the Savior Cathedral on Sunday, he is to be buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, where the graves of his teachers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev also lie. The arrangements echo the prestigious farewell this week that Russia accorded Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.

President Vladimir Putin called Rostropovich's death “a huge loss for Russian culture” and expressed condolences to his loved ones.

Rostropovich, who was known by his friends as “Slava,” was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world's greatest cellist. A bear of a man who hugged practically anyone in sight, he was an effusive rather than an intimidating maestro, a teacher who nurtured Jacqueline du Pre among many other great cellists.

“He was the most inspiring musician that I have ever known,” said David Finckel, the Emerson String Quartet's cellist who studied with Rostropovich for nine years. “He had a way to channel his energy through other people, and it was magical.”

Under Leonid Brezhnev's regime, Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, sheltered dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in their country house in the 1970s.

“The passing of Mstislav Rostropovich is a bitter blow to our culture,” Solzhenitsyn said Friday, according to his wife, Natalya. “He gave Russian culture worldwide fame. Farewell, beloved friend.”

After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote a letter protesting the official Soviet vilification of the author. “Explain to me please, why in our literature and art (that) so often, people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word?” Rostropovich asserted in the letter that went unpublished.

The effort by the cellist and his wife for cultural freedom resulted in the cancellation of concerts, foreign tours and recording projects. In 1974, they fled to Paris with their two daughters and their Soviet citizenship was revoked four years later.

“When Leonid Brezhnev stripped us of our citizenship in 1978, we were obliterated,” Rostropovich recalled in a 1997 interview in Strad magazine. “Russia was in my heart - in my mind. I suffered because I knew that until the day I died, I would never see Russia or my friends again.”

Indeed, he was unable to attend Shostakovich's funeral in 1975.

But in 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, Rostropovich showed up with his cello and played Bach cello suites amid the rubble. The next year, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and he made a triumphant return to Russia to perform with Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 1977 to 1994.

Rostropovich received numerous awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 and a knighthood conferred on him that year by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II on his 60th birthday.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1955, survivors include their daughters, Olga and Elena.