(AP) Mstislav Rostropovich, the ebullient master cellist who courageously fought for the rights of Soviet-era dissidents and later triumphantly played Bach suites below the crumbling Berlin Wall, has died. He was 80.

Rostropovich's death was reported Friday by Russian news agencies and confirmed to The Associated Press by his spokeswoman, Natalia Dollezhal, who did not immediately provide other details.

Rostropovich, who resided in Paris after self-imposed exile, suffered from intestinal cancer. He was hospitalized in Paris in early February, and after he took a turn for the worst, his family arranged for him to be flown back to Russia, longtime manager Ronald Wilford said.

He was treated at a Moscow hospital, and received a visit on Feb. 6 by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Seven weeks later, he was well enough to attend a celebration at the Kremlin on his 80th birthday, but appeared frail.

"I feel myself the happiest man in the world," Rostropovich said after slowly rising from his chair during the March 27 celebration. "I will be even more happy if this evening will be pleasant for you."

Putin then presented him with a medal — the Order of Service to the Fatherland.

A bear of a man who hugged practically anyone in sight, "Slava" Rostropovich was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world's greatest cellist. 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."

Rostropovich's sympathies against the Communist leaders of his homeland started with the denunciations of his teachers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev during the Stalin era.

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

After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote an open letter to the Soviet media protesting the official 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 Rostropovich asserted in the letter that went unpublished.

"I know that after my letter there will be undoubtedly an 'opinion' about me, but I am not afraid of it. I openly say what I think. Talent, of which we are proud, must not be submitted to the assaults of the past."

The couple's fight for cultural freedom resulted in the cancellation of concerts, foreign tours and recording projects. Finally, in 1974, they fled to Paris with their two daughters. Four years later, their Soviet citizenship was revoked.

After arriving in the West, "he was like a little boy, laughing, shouting, pinching himself to make sure these really were the streets in Paris," the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalled in the 1996 book "Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later."

Still, exile took its toll on Rostropovich's soul.

"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.

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