Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (21 page)

Overnight the temperature dropped to minus seventeen Celsius.

At 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, the piano competition commenced with
a meeting of the jury and contestants. There was some confusion about the number of entrants—for the good reason that the organizers wanted to deflect attention from the true figures.
Twenty-five violinists had taken part instead of the anticipated twenty-nine, and of the fifty expected pianists, only thirty-six were present. The absentees included
three Americans: Denver Oldham, a Juilliard graduate who was studying in London; Gladys Stein, who had studied at Columbia and was now in Vienna; and Trudi Martin, who had studied at UCLA. It was not clear whether they had been deterred by the required repertoire, the cost of travel, or the reputation of Red Moscow. Besides the four Americans who had made it, the contestants came from Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador, France, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the USSR, and West Germany.
Six were excused from the first round because they had won first prizes in international competitions, among them Lev Vlassenko, Naum Shtarkman, and, strangely, Danny Pollack and Jerry Lowenthal, who did not meet the criteria but who were perhaps given a pass on the supposition that the Fulbright was evidence of superior attainment. Since the Soviets did not recognize the Leventritt Award, Van was required to play. The thirty contestants drew lots, skipping number thirteen, and Van drew number fifteen.

As for the judges, they comprised perhaps the most formidable piano jury ever assembled. Alongside the sturdy Gilels and the lugubrious Richter was their teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus; and Vladimir Ashkenazy’s teacher, Lev Oborin. The Russian Dmitri Kabalevsky and the Englishman Sir Arthur Bliss represented composers, and the other judges came from Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and the USSR. All told, there were
twelve judges from the Soviet Bloc and five from elsewhere, the latter carefully chosen from different countries and schools of playing to prevent them from forming a cabal.

By now the authorities had decided that Danny Pollack should stay in the competition, playing the pieces he had prepared, with the
stipulation that if he reached the finals, he would be obliged to play a Tchaikovsky concerto. He spent the five days excluded from the first round learning one, though he was more remarked upon among the other contestants for constantly
French-kissing his new bride in the conservatory hallways.

Van’s turn did not come until the morning of Wednesday, April 2, which gave him more precious days to practice. Amid the novelty and excitement, he remembered to take himself to the International Post Office and Telephone Exchange in the Artists’ Foyer upstairs in the main building and send a telegram to Rosina Lhévinne, who was playing a concert at Juilliard that night:

LOVE AND THOUGHTS WITH YOU TONIGHT FIRST PRELIMINARY APRIL 2 MORNING HAPPY BIRTHDAY INDESCRIBABLE JOY EXCITEMENT

Public interest was so intense that the preliminary rounds had been moved from the conservatory’s small hall to the Bolshoi Zal, the Great Hall whose roof rose high above the main buildings. The evening before Van was due to play, he was given a midnight slot to try out its piano. As he climbed the wide, deep staircase, Rachmaninoff’s big E-flat Minor “Étude-Tableau,” op. 33, drifted out of the hall like the
voice of Russia itself. He listened as if he were hearing it for the first time. At the top he crossed the broad foyer with its heavy rugs and peered into a dark anteroom. The glow from a pin light spilled over a bust of Mussorgsky. Through the open door he could see the stage; at the piano was Nadia Gedda-Nova, a French pianist of Russian parentage who cut a glamorous figure with her upswept curls. A great proscenium arch framed her, and behind, in front of a huge pipe organ, was a blown-up photograph of Tchaikovsky garlanded with flowers. Under the high clerestory windows, roundels of Russian and Western composers dignified the walls, and apricot velvet drapes and seats, elaborate plasterwork, and brass light fittings in the form of two trumpets and a lyre completed the fairy-tale scene.

Outside the door Van sat down, got up, and paced back and forth, thinking of the greats whose music these walls contained: Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, Josef and Rosina Lhévinne. The beauty in his mind was not just a dream now: it was all around. An intoxicating rush of bliss swept through him, and his last nerves dissolved away. Here he was, a twenty-three-year-old American, having the time of his life in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.

Back at the hotel he placed a call to Kilgore. The local operator connected him to the long-distance operator, who flatly stated that it was impossible to patch him through to the United States for at least another day. Foreigners quickly learned that there was a trick to this, as to everything else in the Soviet Union. If the caller was a man and the operator a woman, a few minutes of outrageous flirting dramatically reduced the wait to an hour. The phone duly rang, and the operators handed along the call from Moscow to London to the exchange in White Plains, New York, which rang through to the Cliburns. Van told his parents when he would be playing and asked them to pray for him. They prayed for him to do God’s will and for the strength to cope with success or failure. Afterward, Harvey called the local
Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers, and soon they were asking the whole town to pray, too.

AT AN
ungodly hour on Wednesday morning, Van buttoned his sole dress shirt and attached a wing collar lent him by a friend. He tied his white tie, pulled a ratty gray Shetland sweater over his head, and shrugged on his dress jacket.

Outside, the daytime temperature had finally crept above freezing, but a brisk east wind was blowing. Ducking inside the conservatory, he headed straight for the Artists’ Foyer, and at 9:30 a.m. he walked onstage.

He was all arms and had a slight swinging gait. The nylon stocking treatment had done nothing to tamp his mop of curls. His head looked too small for his body, and the expression on his round, boyish face
was disarmingly bashful.
Smiles broke out among the assembled conservatory students, officials, and ordinary Muscovites.

Van sat down quietly at the piano. He tried not to look at the jurors, who were seated in front of the stage behind a row of green baize tables. But Rildia Bee had taught him to pay attention to the number and placing of the audience and the length and ambient noise of the room, and to his surprise, he saw that both levels of the hall were almost full.

He slid his long fingers onto the keys, straightened himself, and froze in position. The audience tensed with him: suddenly the boy was an artist, focusing his body and mind on his instrument. He started with Bach and the suffering tones of the Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor from Book I of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, which he had learned as a child. The stern, spare sound tolled somberly through the hall. After a round of applause, he followed with the Mozart C Major Sonata, K. 330.

Mozart makes a pianist naked. There are few notes and no places to hide. The music either has meaning or is just a collection of sounds. Some pianists can play it as children; some never can. Most Russians, Richter included, found its pregnant simplicities temperamentally uncongenial. Van played unconventional Mozart. His tempos were slow, and his tone burnished; his phrasing broad and sculpted, weighing every note. Norman Shetler, who had played on the first day and was watching now, sensed an almost electrical connection between the audience and this young American. A mesmerized Sergei Dorensky thought Van seemed to be talking to the hall and each person in it. When the last short chord came emphatically down, they paused, and then burst out in a tumult of applause. Van stood up to take a bow, revealing his mangy gray sweater, then sat down and waited for the commotion to die away. To his surprise it carried on, and he had to stand up at the piano three more times. The tension broken, now he dared to sneak a look at the jury.

Next he played
four études, by Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff—the last the piece he had heard swirling at midnight
from the hall—which brought more concentrated bursts of applause. No one seemed to care that he fumbled a few times in Liszt’s gallopingly difficult “Mazeppa.”

The final piece was compulsory: Tchaikovsky’s Theme and Variations in F Major, op. 19, which the audience knew and loved. You could hear the young American’s love, too, and see it. Rocking from the waist into an expansive theme, he arched back from the keys and rolled his head to the ceiling, shaking it slowly as if in wonder, his eyes half-closed in pained ecstasy. Hunched down for an intricate passage, he frowned at his fingers as they flew across the keys. Sending stormy chords crashing around, he tensed and flexed as if he were about to spring off his stool. His playing was ecstatically lyrical, thrillingly Romantic, and symphonic in scale—and
tears glistened in many eyes. In the Marxist-Leninist worldview, Americans were boorish materialists exploited by rapacious Wall Street monopolists and were doomed to be crushed by the engine of history. Next to that diablerie, Van Cliburn looked like an angel, a vulnerable, six-foot-four, mop-haired angel in a plastic wing collar and stringy bow tie. When the last chord stopped echoing, the hall took a collective deep breath and then thundered its approval. The clamor was unabated after Van left the stage, and amid it, two words were heard more and more:

“Vanya! Vanyusha!”

The first was a diminutive of Ivan, the second a diminutive of the diminutive, the kind of pet name a mother might whisper to her child.

Also in the audience was Ella Vlassenko, Iron Lev’s wife. She liked Van’s playing but thought some of it was exaggerated. Still, she couldn’t help seeing that most people were beside themselves—very happy, she thought, that a pianist who wasn’t one of their own was playing well. She began to worry for her husband.

THE JURY
had been given a huge room for its deliberations, with a big table in the center. As the jurors filed in they disposed themselves round it—all except Sviatoslav Richter, who dragged his brooding
form to a piano in the far corner. With his chiseled chin, thinning hair brushed forward, and almost comically morose expression, at forty-three Richter cut a striking figure. It was the first time he had been roped into a jury, and he was even less inclined than usual to be complaisant.

The unenviable task of managing Richter fell to his fellow Odessan Emil Gilels, who was far from a detached observer. The younger man by nearly two years, the prickly Gilels
resented Richter’s first rank and often sulked around him. Worse still was the obvious collusion between Richter and their teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus. Now a few days shy of his seventieth birthday, Neuhaus was like a father to Richter; as a young man, Richter had often slept under the piano in Neuhaus’s tiny living room, and the two instinctively understood each other. Both were of German extraction and had been suspected of spying during the war; Neuhaus was carted off to the Lubyanka and almost certain death, but his students dangerously appealed to Stalin, and instead he was sent into exile. Gilels was convinced that Neuhaus preferred Richter’s playing to his and had deliberately set Richter up in opposition to him, a suspicion that assumed such paranoid proportions that Gilels wrote to Neuhaus and the newspapers
denying he had ever been his student. To Gilels, their joint presence was a torment, which only grew worse when the pair turned up late several times during the competition, completely
missing one morning session. Nor were these the only tensions in the room. Neuhaus was no admirer of the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, whom he termed the
“poor man’s Prokofiev.” Richter, outdoing him, called Kabalevsky
“deeply unpleasant” and declared that it had never occurred to him to play his “threadbare music.” Kabalevsky had been quick to turn his back on Shostakovich when he was denounced at the Union of Soviet Composers, with which he was heavily involved. Just now he and its first secretary, Tikhon Khrennikov, an unreconstructed Stalinist who was also on the organizing committee of the competition, had
ganged up on the composer Nikita Bogoslovsky for the crime of inviting a diplomat to a comedy soiree at the Central House of
Art Workers without proper authorization, and despite extracting a groveling letter, they had expelled him from the Composers’ Union.