When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath

261 Pages·2017·19.62 MB·English

by  Stuart Isacoff

ALSO BY STUART ISACOFF
A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians—from
Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between
Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western
Civilization

In memory of my mother, Hannah
The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions
facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being
which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an
acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our
capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our
lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of
fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of
solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the
solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in
fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the
dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
—JOSEPH CONRAD
Contents
Cover
Also by Stuart Isacoff
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE Crowds in the Streets
CHAPTER 1 Van
CHAPTER 2 From Juilliard to the Big Time
CHAPTER 3 The Big Decision
CHAPTER 4 A Tale of Two Nations
CHAPTER 5 The Great Convergence
CHAPTER 6 The Land of Snow and Spies
CHAPTER 7 Some Wins, Some Losses
CHAPTER 8 The Storm Before the Calm
CHAPTER 9 Hurt Feelings
CHAPTER 10 Red, White, and Blues
CHAPTER 11 The Van Effect
CHAPTER 12 Van, Continued
CHAPTER 13 The End of the Road
EPILOGUE The Other Competitors
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photographic Credits
A Note about the Author
Illustrations
PROLOGUE
Crowds in the Streets
THE CROWDS GREW DAILY in front of the Moscow Conservatory of Music:
workmen in their fur hats; matriarchs draped in black coats and scarves; teenage
girls clutching bundles of flowers and shivering in the crisp air. A haze of chilled
breath covered those who gathered, like fine dust. Clouds hovered overhead,
lending a bleak cast to the setting. It was April, when the patches of ice on
Moscow’s streets usually give way to the spring sun, as tender blades rise up
from beneath the ground’s frozen surface. In 1958, though, the ghost of winter
lingered on. And people still continued to congregate.
They clustered around the monument of Tchaikovsky at the perimeter of the
school—a restructured eighteenth-century manor house, once occupied by
royalty—and spilled out into the snow-covered courtyard. As they reached a
wall of militiamen blocking the entrance, their unsynchronized parade congealed
into a serried mass before falling into disarray.
In a city where people often queued up even without knowing what they
might find—fish? bananas? concert tickets?—long lines were a way of life.
Writer Igor Efimov invented a character who secretly loved these assemblages:
“She felt peaceful in them, as if contained in a safe shell composed of the people
in front of and behind her.” Most Muscovites simply resigned themselves to the
situation. In this crowd, though, people were fired up.
They were there hopefully to see the talk of the town: a long-legged young
Texan whose soaring pianism had for days been enthralling audiences at the
first-ever Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, a high-culture version
of the World Cup pitting musical talents from around the globe against one
another. The contest had been designed to bolster Soviet pride by anointing a
hometown winner. Yet all attention was now focused on the uncanny American
whose musical talent stunned the judges and drove mobs of ordinary citizens
into a frenzy.
—
The buzz about him began in the Conservatory’s Great Hall during the contest’s
opening round, and soon floated through the city like a vapor. As newspaper
editors and broadcasters fanned the excitement, tickets became as rare as the
Romanov crown jewels. Van Cliburn, from Kilgore, Texas, was all the rage.
Workers with little education began to stalk certain streets hoping for a glimpse
of him. When pianist Lev Vlassenko, the Soviet Union’s top contender in the
competition—and the Kremlin’s presumptive winner—took a taxi to the
conservatory, the driver asked him, “And how is the tall one doing?”
It was a stunning turn of events. Tension between the United States and the
Soviet Union had been steadily rising since the launch in 1957 of the first
Sputnik space satellite. By the time of the Tchaikovsky Competition, the West
was collectively holding its breath out of fear that bombs would soon be falling
from the skies; American children regularly practiced diving under their desks in
school in preparation for the coming disaster.
With such pervasive antipathy between the nations, no one could have
predicted that by the end of the first two series of eliminations an American
would be poised to reach the top rung in this Soviet contest. In a culture where
nearly everything was based on political calculation, Van’s advance toward a
possible victory was big news. Yet, to nearly everyone who heard him, it seemed
inevitable.
He was six foot four and capped by bushy blond hair (the American
ambassador’s wife dubbed him “Brillo Top”). His face had an Irish lilt, with its
finely sculpted jaw and cheekbones; thin, sensual lips; and cornflower-blue eyes.
And he was oh, so thin! When seated at the piano he looked like “a peapod with
great Jack the Giant Killer hands,” said one of his managers, Schuyler Chapin.
Critic Winthrop Sargeant described the pianist’s fingers as a “bunch of
asparagus.” Neither image sounded especially lovely, though each framed him as
a force of nature.
Nevertheless, remembered Max Frankel, then in Moscow as a correspondent
for The New York Times, young Russian girls were swooning. Women of a
certain age wanted to adopt him. Their daughters had other designs.
His admirers in the concert hall and those who heard him over the radio or
saw him on television were hooked almost from the moment the twenty-three-
year-old first appeared on the stage. But it wasn’t the music alone that drew
them. His Southern charm was as thick as gravy on fresh biscuits as he greeted
his new fans with the prim decorousness of a proper East Texas gentleman,
unfailingly gracious at every turn. The Russian public had embraced virtuosos
before, but Van was a different sort. He showed none of the brooding intensity
of Sviatoslav Richter, or the demonic sparks of Vladimir Horowitz; the ground
and the walls didn’t shake when he performed, as they had seemed to for Anton
Rubinstein. He simply played like an angel. Muscovites surrendered their hearts
to him.
Even his odd mannerisms were inexplicably endearing, like the way he
casually furrowed his brow when speaking, suggesting a sort of backwoods
Clark Gable, or his habit of looking upward when he played, as if communing
with the heavens whenever the music reached an emotional peak, while his lips
formed a nearly perpetual pucker from the Life Savers he routinely kept in his
mouth. Two of the competition’s most celebrated jury members, pianists Lev
Oborin and Heinrich Neuhaus, debated those head motions. “Why does he do
that?” asked Oborin, disapprovingly. “He’s conversing with God,” replied
Neuhaus. “That was [a gift] not given to us.”
Broadcasts of the competition were so popular that the streets were often
empty when the pianists were performing. Listening became a collective rite,
binding enthusiasts together into what one prominent Russian music critic called
a national veche, the equivalent of a medieval popular assembly. Those admirers
created so strong a ballast against possible Kremlin tampering with the jury vote
that it was said years later by critic Tamara Grum-Grzhimailo that the seeds of
perestroika were first planted in this moment, during the Tchaikovsky
Competition. Some in the Kremlin, of course, resisted the American’s
coronation, dreading a Cold War defeat. Yet Van’s appeal was hardly political.
It was personal. He had the uncanny ability to melt nearly anyone’s self-reserve.
He had always worn his heart on his sleeve, and though hard-nosed friends in
New York often snickered at his overwrought sentimentality, the Russians
responded in kind. Van’s deep-seated humility made his magnetism, even his
exaggerated emotions, feel trustworthy.
Below the surface, a more complex dynamic was in play. Raised in the
genteel hothouse of an East Texas culture where people are taught to keep their
inner demons well buried, Cliburn was less simple than he seemed, yet he