Enforce No Frontiers for the Human Spirit : Bureaucracy: Washington wants to deny visas to performers who aren’t long-term members of visiting ensembles.

I was 18 when I first went to Europe. It was a cold, unbelievably bleak visit to Moscow. For the first time, I knew a certain kind of fear, as if I were being watched or judged secretly. I also for the first time met a searing and bone-deep intensity--I had never met musicians who worked this hard; nothing at the Juilliard School compared to it. And never before had I met such openness either, such personal warmth. The mesmerizing personality that was the man Shostakovich, the exuberant energy of Rostropovich--each day brought a new onslaught of experience and density. I was not the same musician when I returned.

There were many years in which I longed to play in Russia again. It never happened; no refusal, as such, but no visa, either. The deadening fog of bureaucracy had settled over me. Who had summed me up and found me wanting? Was I not famous enough? Not influential enough? Perhaps not politically correct?

Every time I play Shostakovich, I have in my mind the pinched, white face of this great creator who was rarely allowed out of his country, not allowed to write music that was not acceptable to the apparatchiks. And each and every time, I bless my fortune in being born here. My ancestors fled famine in Scotland and oppression in Ireland that I could stand free.

And is it this same country, I ask myself, that now plans to put up barriers, to set the bureaucrats loose on art and artists, to evaluate both and to decide who is “famous” enough, who is deserving of permission to enter the United States?

I have learned so much from visitors of the past. The precision and taut energy of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, an ever-changing “railway station” of an orchestra with the finest players of a generation passing through month to month, let alone year to year--are we truly never to be allowed to hear them here again? That’s what could come of the proposed rule to deny visas to performers who aren’t long-term members of the visiting ensemble. The sumptuous pride of the Vienna Philharmonic and the lesser-known legacy carried here by the Bartok Quartet, whose musicians reach back to the inner life of mid-European culture--are we to be denied the wealth they would share with us?

But let us consider the other side of the coin. Suppose other countries retaliate and peer around their own doors only to slam them in our faces. Certainly I would be fine--wouldn’t I? After all, I hold an international chair in London. But the musician I am now, the one who commutes three, four times a year to Europe, is the same unknown cellist in his 20s who walked the cobbled streets of Germany, marveling as he touched the spirits of men whose music he played. The man I am now is the same young cellist who, coming across the murals of Giotto in Padua, suddenly understood the world of medieval music and the spirit of faith in a prayerful time. It was the beginning of my career and a time when such exposure could not be had by any other means.

Every young American artist has to walk out on stage in Europe and prove--again and again--that we amount to more than hot dogs, popcorn and flashy fingers. But in countering this prejudice, it means we have to know in a deep way what European civilization means. In staring down such prejudice, we grow and develop. As a young musician, I longed for a tortured Russian mask to wear over my Texas-reared, quarterback frame. In time I learned that the tortured mask had to be in my heart. That was what counted.

The human spirit, as born from artistic struggle, carries across frontiers. To me, it is a nightmare to imagine that at the same moment those frontiers are opening to us in Eastern Europe, we are producing the mirror image of a situation that was so abhorrent to us all for decades. How can this be?

What artists are clamoring at our doors that we should not pull them wide open and thank God that after wars, industrialization, poverty, brutality, there are still artists left to sing the human song? And what sound would there be in the forest if only the “famous” birds sang?