Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (23 page)

Finally, on Tuesday evening, it was Lev Vlassenko’s turn. For once Lev took a taxi to the conservatory, and no sooner had he given the address than the driver began talking about the competition. “Well, how’s that long one getting on?” he asked, referring to Van. In the Great Hall, Vlassenko’s teacher, Jacob
Flier, hid behind the organ, furiously smoking, though he had just given it up, nervous that his best student might implode. Sometimes he could tell from the way Lev came onstage and walked to the piano that something was wrong.

The favorite stepped out, pale in his dinner jacket and forcing a smile as he turned to the audience, making Flier’s heart jump. Yet the weeks of seclusion and the months of obsessive concentration had paid off. Vlassenko’s playing was brilliant and flawless, the epitome of the fearsomely virtuosic Soviet pianist. Not for nothing did one Western musician despair that behind the Iron Curtain “they had
nothing but golden monsters with twenty-four fingers.”

Ella was there to cheer him on. She was pleased, but she had also watched Van a second time, and now she had a new cause for concern. Outrageous gossip had reached her ears about Lev’s background. His family had long concealed their roots in the nobility and
czarist military, hiding papers, portraits, and medals in their cellar back in Georgia. But that was not at issue.
“Is it true that Lev Vlassenko is Khrushchev’s nephew?” Ella was asked, to her astonishment, and suddenly she realized the suggestion of nepotism was a thinly veiled threat. Rumors were rife that the competition was a stitch-up; the word was that a poster had already been printed announcing government protégé Lev Vlassenko as winner of the first prize.

MARK SCHUBART
had now arrived in Moscow, his State Department expense forms at the ready, pretending, as instructed, that he was present in a
private capacity. On his first evening, he attended a reception given by Richard Davis, counselor at the American embassy, and found Van the center of attention. Schubart asked some musicians what had happened, and they told him that “Vanya” was the toast of Moscow. Schubart immediately set out to track down Max Frankel, the young Moscow correspondent of the
New York Times
, to tip him off.

“Is this kid really so phenomenal, or is this just another case of Frank Sinatra bobby soxers?” the owlish Frankel skeptically asked, his serious glasses and steady expression belying his twenty-seven years.

“No, he’s a hell of a musician,” Schubart assured him. “He’s well in line to win this thing, if the Russians ever let him.”

Frankel scented a scoop and wangled himself a pass for the finals. American ambassador Llewellyn Thompson also decided to attend. A diplomat from a modest Colorado Baptist background who was universally known as “Tommy,” Thompson had fully intended to stay away. With the sense of inevitability that infected all Western diplomats in Moscow, even one just a year into his post, the soft-spoken Thompson had explained that he was “tired of coming in
second or third against the Russians.”

The next day, Schubart took himself to the conservatory and caught some of the last semifinalists, including Danny Pollack, who had chosen the same Barber concerto as Van and played it with scrupulous finesse. Afterward the competition press people got hold of
the Juilliard dean, who made a big play of Rosina Lhévinne’s renown as the school’s leading teacher. By the time he was through it was almost midnight, and he was trying to leave when Van emerged from his studio.
“Come on, you’ve got to hear me,” he said, and dragged Schubart in to listen to Kabalevsky’s “Rondo,” the piece written specially for the finals. Van played it through, and then played it another three times. “He would have played all night,” Schubart said, “if I’d let him.”

The last semifinalist performed Wednesday evening, and for a second time the judges retired to their room. Some were patently nervous. The young Sequeira Costa had quickly gathered that Lev Vlassenko was the
“chosen one.” It was far from clear what would happen if an American won instead. Many of the judges were guests in the country, and Khrushchev was as unpredictable as a wounded bull. As for the Soviet judges, they could only guess what kind of retribution the Union of Soviet Composers might dream up if they denied their compatriot first prize.

Sviatoslav Richter could not have cared less. He was convinced that most of the other judges were either idiots or craven stooges in thrall to the state. To his mind, there were only three real pianists in the competition, with Cliburn clearly first. Again he sent over his marks from the piano. Sequeira Costa watched Gilels’s face as he went through the sheets, stopped at Richter’s, and looked up at him.

“Why do you do this?” he asked. “Because this is not good for the general marks.”

“For me,” Richter answered, “people either make music or not music.”

Kabalevsky chimed in, accusing Richter of the crime of
“individualism,” and
other members of the jury protested, too. Richter drew a conclusion: “It was the
first international competition to be held in Moscow, and it was vital that it should be won by a Soviet pianist.”

The story was later put about,
in part by Richter himself, that he had given all but his three favored competitors zero points. This evolved into a legend that he had awarded Van twenty-five points
(or one hundred, in wilder versions) and all the others zero in order to leave only Van standing. In fact, Richter gave Van twenty-five points, Lev Vlassenko twenty-four, and Liu Shikun twenty-three, but he also gave four contestants (Nadia Gedda-Nova of France, Milena Mollova of Bulgaria, Naum Shtarkman, and Daniel Pollack) fifteen points each. All the others, including Eddik Miansarov and Jerome Lowenthal, got zero. The converse theory later spread that there was nothing to the gossip and that Richter had not given any zeros at all. Someone certainly wanted people to believe that: Richter wrote his marks in purple ink, but the
zeros were later crossed out and carefully changed in blue ink to threes. Maybe Gilels, who used the same blue ink, doctored the sheets, worried that his handling of the jury would be criticized. Possibly a faceless bureaucrat did it. Or perhaps it was Richter himself, responding in a typically insolent way to a scolding from Gilels or another official; after all, to give thirteen competitors three points each was no less dismissive than giving them zero.

When the marks were tallied, Lev Vlassenko was in the lead, with 411 points. Second was Liu Shikun, with 404. With 393, Van was tied for third place with Naum Shtarkman. Danny Pollack was fifth, with 345. The result was a relief for the more nervous jurors, who hoped that an awkward and potentially dangerous conflict with the authorities would be headed off. Still, several excellent Soviet pianists had been eliminated, and after more discussion the jury decided to address the Ministry of Culture, asking permission to add an extra prize. The request was granted, and to fit in Eddik Miansarov, the
field of finalists expanded from eight to nine. Late at night the contestants were finally called together and the names were read out:

From the Soviet Union, Lev Vlassenko, Naum Shtarkman, and Eduard Miansarov.

From America, Van Cliburn and Daniel Pollack.

From China, Liu Shikun.

From Bulgaria, Milena Mollova.

From France, Nadia Gedda-Nova.

From Japan, Toyoaki Matsuura.

YET THERE
was also the public to worry about. Vanya-mania, a mostly female phenomenon, was seizing Moscow with indecent haste. It had little in common with the Tarzan cult or the previous summer’s wild alfresco couplings. Van brought a different ideal of a man and attracted a different type of admirer: the nice Soviet girl. Well-behaved young Soviet women were not supposed to smoke or drink, frequent nightclubs, wear lipstick, or paint their nails. They studied hard, spoke seriously, dressed conservatively, were strongly patriotic, and thought the West was deeply decadent. Still, it was impossible to see Van, with his curly blond hair and beautiful long fingers, as the enemy. He was kind, and sensitive, and charming, and modest, and very tall, and a bit of a mama’s boy. He disliked rock and roll and espoused Russian virtues such as sentiment and nostalgia. The more they heard about him, the more they found him “just like us.” Girls bearing flowers began pursuing him for autographs. They carefully cut out his photograph from the papers and
slept with it under their pillows. Suddenly they had a Westerner they could safely adore. Their mothers could hardly complain, since they, too, had fallen in love with the sweet, vulnerable American. Jerry Lowenthal, who had time on his hands after failing to make the finals—perhaps because his more intellectual style was swept away in the Cliburn wave—had trouble containing his cynicism when women approached him wanting to talk about Van.
“He reminds me of my son,” the older ones said with sighs, while their daughters wanted to know if Van was married. Tarzan haircuts were for the chop: suddenly a bushy, curly coiffure was the rage for men and women alike.

The competition continued without pause, and the finals began Thursday evening. This time every moment was to be beamed to television sets across the USSR.

Van’s turn came Friday at 7:00 p.m. That morning, he had rehearsed with the renowned Moscow State Symphony, and now he
was sitting in the Peking Hotel dining room in full concert dress, staring like a condemned man at the meal spread in front of him. He decided he wasn’t hungry and instead downed in one gulp his preperformance booster of three raw eggs cracked into a glass, yolks intact. A journalist named Paul Moor
snapped him in the act. Ten years older than Van, Moor had been around since the start of the competition, which he was covering for
Life
and
Time.
He came from El Paso, Texas, had briefly studied at Juilliard, and had been
involved with the composer Aaron Copland. Van’s cousin
Mrs. Lillian Reid was his old algebra teacher, and when it turned out that Moor, too, had been taught piano by a
pupil of Arthur Friedheim, Van must have wondered if there was anyone in the world he could trust more. When it was time, they headed to the conservatory together.

A picture of pandemonium met their eyes. For three nights, students had camped outside the box office, hoping for a spare seat. Favors had been called in to procure tickets reserved for officials, but even those with high connections had been turned away. Thousands had come to try their luck or witness the event, and they had jammed the courtyard and narrow streets, bringing pedestrian traffic to a standstill. The police were struggling to keep order as ticketless fans tried to rush the line or slip quietly behind it. Those who were caught were roughly dealt with, and as the chaos worsened, KGB guards materialized to keep order. This was not just a musical event; it was a national festival that had taken on the fervency of a mass demonstration.

In his dressing room, Van downed an assortment of vitamin pills and applied drops to his nose. He sat up straight and put his hands on his knees.
His right index finger was bandaged after a cut had opened into a full-length split from too much practicing. He closed his eyes, inhaled in four gulps through his nose until his chest filled out, and exhaled in four bursts. Then he prayed.

Max Frankel jostled through the crowds, headed up the great staircase, and found his seat near the flower-bedecked stage. Looking around, the journalist saw many familiar faces. Virtually the
entire Soviet
nomenklatura
seemed to be there with its wives, instantly recognizable by their government-store garb copied from the pages of Western fashion magazines. At stage right, the dowager queen Elisabeth sat in the government box alongside Khrushchev’s daughter. Besides the seventeen hundred seated ticket holders, scores stood shoulder to shoulder down the aisles and lined the backs of the balconies.
Harriet Wingreen was waiting to watch her fellow Juilliard alum, and Norman Shetler was in the front row. Paul Moor was ready with his camera, and Ambassador Thompson was in place with his wife, Jane.

Onstage the orchestra tuned up. The jurors took their seats at the front. Richter was especially restless; perhaps he was still thinking about the
poor French girl who had made such a mess of her concerto the previous night that he had felt physically ill.