by Nigel Cliff
Operas were for special occasions, but concerts were part of the plan. Sometimes he felt as if he were growing up on Highway 80, where the forests gave way to sparser trees and open plains, rushing up to Dallas or anywhere a big-name performer was playing, pulling over to stanch one of his nosebleeds with the kit they always had at hand, sleeping on the backseat during the drive home. The hum of tires on tarmac relaxed him, and on the cusp of his teens, he announced that he wanted to be a taxi driver. Mother was not amused, which was perhaps the point.
He was never a regular kid, and he knew it. When he entered Kilgore Junior High he was already growing like a beanstalk in a wet spring, and basketball coach Q. L. Bradford made a beeline for him. Rildia Bee graciously steered the coach away: she appreciated his interest, she said, but it was impossible; her son’s fingers were insured for a million dollars and were made for playing the piano, not shooting or dribbling a ball. The school band director had a friendlier reception when he dropped by: Van got himself a uniform, learned how to play the clarinet, and marched up and down tootling away, safely on the sidelines, when the Bulldogs played football. But when he moved to high school, Rildia Bee quickly buttonholed his physical education instructor, Bob Waters, who spoke to the principal, C. L. Newsome, who excused Van from classes. One day, when he was playing ball in the street with some friends, he jammed his finger, and she restricted that kind of play, too. He was not bothered enough about sports to care, but when he won the leading role of Mr. Belvedere, an elderly babysitter with a mysterious past, in the class play Sitting Pretty, he was desperate to take it and forlorn when Rildia Bee decreed that the rehearsals would encroach too much on his practice time. As a small protest, he became president of the Thespian Club and the Spanish Club, and a member of the Student Council.
His school friends liked his quick laugh and antsy friendliness and wicked impressions, but he had precious little time to hang out with them. He had a desperate crush on a pretty young Latin teacher named Winifred Hamilton and moped with another boy who shared it, but the few girls he managed to date were all Rildia Bee’s students. In his heart, though, he sensed that Mother knew best. She taught him to work hard enough to make it look easy when he played in public. She trained him to make a percussion instrument sing like a lyric instrument. She told him not to play faster than he could appreciate the music, that playing more slowly with greater rhythmic precision sounded faster than letting the notes tumble over one another. Music was a serious business, she lectured: “It stimulates both sides of the brain and enlivens the soul.” That dictum and her others were wired into his brain: “Sing it before you play it.” “You must find a singing sound.” “Listen for the eye of the sound.” “The first instrument was the human voice.” Once, she took Van to audition for the famous Spanish pianist and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star José Iturbi. “You already have the best teacher,” Iturbi told him. “You see, Mother?” Van said impatiently, and refused to hear of studying under anyone else.
It was always Mother, and Daddy of course, who was away a lot—“Sonny Boy,” he’d say as he left in search of fairly priced crude, “now, you take care of your mother”—but who knew his son better than many fathers in an emotionally glacial age. If a friend had dared warn about the risks of raising a prodigy—for there were plenty of examples of infant marvels who startled grown-ups with their dazzling finger work only to lead lives misshapen by their devouring talent—Van would have understood least of all. He loved the company of adults, their attention and their stories of past times. By age eight, he had read his first book about English antique silver (in which his aunt was an expert) and learned all the markings by heart. He was born old, he said while still young. The past was the most beautiful place to be, and music was his time machine.
AS WORLD War II ended, Van’s yearning to visit Russia faded like an old photograph, leaving only a nostalgic dream. But he had Russia’s music at his fingertips, and that was nearly as good. Rildia Bee enjoyed reminding him that he was getting the teaching of the great masters, Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, thirdhand; she had had it secondhand, she brightly added. Deep in East Texas she kept the Romantic flame burning pure and true, untainted by modern influences, and passed the torch on to her son. He had the demonstrative nature, the physical equipment, and a natural nobility of expression that perfectly suited the grandly expressive Russian style.
Van’s first big chance to show it off came when he was twelve and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 appeared on the list of pieces eligible for the annual Texas State Music Contest sponsored by Texas Gulf Sulphur Company. He memorized it in twenty-one days, Rildia Bee crossing each day off on the blackboard, and won the two-hundred-dollar prize. Then he played it with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, a plump pink boy with wavy ginger hair in a tweed suit and wide-collared shirt grinning behind the piano and sounding as if he’d been born a hundred years before. At the end, the orchestra as well as the audience jumped to its feet. It was as if the fresh-faced kid had mysteriously channeled the soul of Tchaikovsky, the most Russian composer of them all.
Perhaps it was just as well that Van was unable to visit Tchaikovsky’s homeland, because it bore little similiarity to the country of his dreams. Barely two years after the end of the war, a Cold War was setting in between the Soviet Union and its former allies. Behind the Kremlin walls that so appealed to Van’s childish imagination, Joseph Stalin was driving his scientists to replicate the atomic bombs that America had exploded above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the dictator sought security by toying with the fates of neighboring nations, an Iron Curtain fell across Europe, and the shadow of totalitarianism and police government settled on its eastern half. In the Soviet Union, too, the relative freedoms of war retreated before a new campaign of fear. Once more, black secret police vans mockingly painted with advertisements for scarce meat and scarcer Soviet champagne roamed the streets, and routine torture, forced confessions, sham trials, mass deportations, summary executions, and arranged accidents began all over again.
To scour away the effects of exposure to the West during the wartime alliance, Stalin launched a campaign to expunge foreign influence from Soviet society—especially that of America, which was denounced from loudspeakers strung along streets as “the warmonger and imperialist oppressor.” The arts were not immune, and of all Soviet arts, classical music was first.
High art had survived the Russian Revolution thanks to the leading role of the intelligentsia, who had simply declared the arts socialized. Lenin had envisioned concert halls packed with workers absorbing the improving strains of the classics. Stalin, a fanatical consumer of culture who attended Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake thirty times, saw music as a useful tool of ideology. In 1936 the dictator had lured Sergei Prokofiev back to Russia after nearly two decades’ exile in America and Europe. Now he turned on him and Dmitri Shostakovich, Prokofiev’s rival for the title of greatest Soviet composer. In February 1948 the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution that attacked both men, together with other leading composers, for exhibiting bourgeois tendencies. In Soviet speak, a lexicon in which words acquired the opposite of their usual meaning, bourgeois signified avant-garde styles of Western origin. Allied to it was formalism, connoting a work of uninhibited creativity. Such “degenerate music” was rejected as difficult and therefore useless for developing proletarian culture; in its place was prescribed socialist realism, which was not intended to portray life as it actually was but rather as it would be in the ideal workers’ paradise. In practice, this amounted to bad imitations of Tchaikovsky’s stodgier successors, seasoned with hummable melodies and rousing heroic themes, but since composers were paid and given privileges by the state, so long as they obeyed party precepts their livelihood needed have no correlation with their talent. That much was clear when speakers at the ensuing First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers dismissed Comrade Prokofiev’s music as “grunting and scraping,” ridiculed Comrade Shostakovich’s oeuvre as a “muddled, ner
ve-wracking” hubbub exhibiting a neurotic and repulsive pathology, and labeled both men “enemies of Russian music.” In Stalinist Russia, this was an attack on not just their careers but potentially their lives. Prokofiev found many of his works banned and the rest suppressed for fear of official displeasure; heavily in debt, he secluded himself to conserve his energy for composing. His estranged Spanish wife, Lina, was arrested on a charge of espionage and hauled off to the Lubyanka, the yellow neoclassical prison at the core of the Soviet police state. After nine months of torture she was sentenced to twenty years in the Gulag, the notorious chain of forced labor camps scattered across Soviet territory, on the basis of an extracted confession that was, anyway, a bureaucratic formality: in those days, there was a specific category for spouses and children of the condemned, “Traitor of Motherland Family Member.”
As for Shostakovich, he had been here before, in 1936, when he was denounced and ostracized so severely that for months his life hung in the balance. He embraced the new attacks with abject humility. “Once again,” he wrote in an open letter, “I moved in the direction of formalism and have begun to speak a language the people do not understand . . . I know that the Party is right. I am deeply grateful for the criticism.” Even so, his music was boycotted, his family’s privileges were rescinded, and he was fired from his job at the conservatory, where composers scrambled to accuse one another of formalism in hopes of deflecting the charge from their own work. Reserved and testy, alternately apologetic and irritable, Shostakovich busied himself with synchronizing the clocks in his apartment, cleaning obsessively, and checking the performance of the postal service by mailing himself cards.
In a system where one man’s word was law, fortunes could change with dizzying speed, and in 1949 Stalin decided he needed Shostakovich as a delegate to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace being held in New York that March. The meeting was among the most daring and successful creations of the Cominform (short for Communist Information Bureau), which Stalin had set up two years earlier as a lavishly funded vehicle for coordinating international political warfare. As the Congress filled the Art Deco halls of the Waldorf-Astoria, American liberals, including composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, spoke in favor of peaceful cooperation, while other liberals mounted a picket outside, one brandishing a placard reading “Shostakovich! Jump thru the window!” in reference to a recent defection from the Soviet consulate.
Shostakovich was the celebrity witness to the glories of Soviet culture, but the luxury accommodation was no recompense for the humiliation he suffered. At the official press conference, he stood up, his face a “bag of ticks and grimaces,” his eyes downcast behind thick wire-rimmed glasses, and read from a prepared statement, accusing Western “hatemongers” of “preparing world opinion for the transition from cold war to outright war.” In the audience was the Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his first cousin Vladimir, had fled the revolution and taken U.S. citizenship. Nabokov watched Shostakovich read in a shaky voice before breaking off a short way through, leaving a “suave radio baritone” to finish his speech, and decided to expose the sham. Jumping to his feet, Nabokov loudly asked if the composer supported the recent Soviet vilification of his great compatriot Igor Stravinsky. Shostakovich worshipped Stravinsky as a composer, if not always as a man, but he was forced to parrot the official line. To Nabokov, this was proof enough that Shostakovich was “not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government.”
Later that year, in his oratorio The Song of the Forests, Shostakovich extolled Stalin as the “great gardener,” and rehabilitated himself a second time. Nabokov, meanwhile, became secretary-general of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA client organization that covertly funded moderate left-wing European intellectuals as an antidote to far-left-wing European intellectuals who claimed that culture and communism were better bedfellows than culture and liberal democracy. Music featured heavily among its many projects, including a festival staged in Paris called Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, which was designed to pick up the baton of modernism the Soviets had dropped. Heading the program was The Rite of Spring, with its composer, Stravinsky, whom Nabokov had sought out in Los Angeles, prominently in attendance.
Music was no longer a bond between East and West; on the contrary, both sides manipulated it to point up their differences. The cultural chasm widened as the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device in August 1949, as China fell to Mao Zedong’s Communists weeks later, and as U.S. forces went back into action in Korea the following summer. America fell prey to a hysterical Red Scare, fanned by Senator Joe McCarthy, which sought to expose Communists and fellow travelers in every area of public life, including classical music. In this toxic atmosphere, anything Russian was beyond the pale. One producer at the Voice of America, the nation’s external broadcaster, asked the music library for a recording of a popular piece called “Song of India” and found that the Red baiters had banned it. “It’s by Rimsky-Korsakov,” the librarian explained, “and we’re not supposed to use anything by Russians.”
For the crew-cut American pianists who came of age in the 1950s, the steely tones and coiled rhythms of modern music were all the rage. Germanic composers were also firmly back in favor: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were the undisputed masters. As for Russian music and the whole Romantic repertoire, with its cult of the inspired virtuoso (including the Hungarian Liszt and the Polish Chopin), it was suddenly as out of fashion as powdered wigs and pistols at dawn. To a mop-haired seventeen-year-old who arrived in New York in the fall of 1951, this came as an awful shock.
• 2 •
Room 412
A TALL pile of loud clothes was flapping along the hallway of the Juilliard School toward the elevator where the legendary Rosina Lhévinne was standing. Barely inhabiting the colorful threads was a rawboned creature with enormous waving hands, a snub nose, and a frizz of gingery blond curls that bounced nearly up to the ceiling. The kid was six foot four, maybe six foot seven with the hair. Rosina, who stood five foot two, craned her neck to find a spotty, boyish face beaming down at her with intent.
“Honey,” Van Cliburn announced, “ah’ve come to study with y’all.”
Joe, the school’s Irish elevator operator, might well have spluttered, for this was not the way to address New York’s most revered piano teacher. At seventy-one, the Russian-born Madame Lhévinne was loved and feared in equal measure. One observer suggested she combined the autocracy of Catherine the Great with the coarseness of a droshky driver. If you could get through your pieces in room 412 at Juilliard, it was said, you could play anywhere in the world.
Rosina scanned the speaker’s face. She had not seen him before, but the voice was familiar: a honey-and-mesquite drawl that was at once grave and impish. He had telephoned her the other day from the Buckingham Hotel, where he was staying with his mother. During three summers, the pair had traveled up from Texas and enrolled Van in school in order to find the right teacher, and Rildia Bee had then written the school with their final choice: Rosina Lhévinne. Now they had received the school registration card only to find Van had been assigned to another teacher’s class. They felt hurt, bewildered, and betrayed.
Rosina explained that her classes, which were always oversubscribed, were unfortunately full. She had not heard Van play at the auditions, and he would have to make do with one of her assistants. “Perhaps,” she had offered over the telephone, “I can take you next year.”
“But I must study with you, Mrs. Lhévinne,” the voice had come back, its unrushed tones curling round every word. “Even if you can give me only ten minutes a week, I’ll consider myself your pupil. However”—and here the voice lingered with a warning edge—“if you definitely can’t take me and I go to another teacher, I’ll stay with that teacher until I graduate. What I want you to know about me, Mrs. Lhévinne, is that I’m very loyal.”
“Shhh,” Rildia Bee had whispered from the other room of the
little suite. As usual, Harvey had stayed back home in Texas.
“No, Mother,” Van had said firmly when he put the phone down. “She’s a very nice lady, but I want her to know—when I begin, I stay and I end.”
As luck would have it, Rosina already had two students from Texas. Jeaneane Dowis, a pretty, preppy, quick-witted brunette from Grapevine, was eighteen but had been at Juilliard for two years already. Her friend James Mathis, from Dallas, also eighteen, had just joined the Lhévinne class. Together they put in a word for Van: at the very least, they said, Madame should hear him play.
JUILLIARD OCCUPIED a sandwich of limestone buildings at West 122nd Street, between Claremont Avenue and Broadway, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. One slice was the handsome Edwardian mansion of the old Institute of Musical Arts; the other, in streamlined Art Deco by the Empire State Building architects, was added when the institute merged with the school founded, after much skullduggery, with the fortune of textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard. Six hundred artistic souls crammed into a tangle of pastel green corridors and stairways and halls, each confidently expecting a dazzling solo career and almost all destined to be brutally disappointed. Pianists, numbering two hundred or so, were the dominant tribe; there were also violinists, cellists, wind and brass players, percussionists, singers, composers, conductors, and, this year, dancers, whom the musicians noticed chiefly on account of their odor. Like monks in a cell, the musical novices shut themselves in rehearsal studios for ten hours a day, banding together to keep rivals away and scaring off freshmen with tall tales of razor blades planted between piano keys. Social life was intense but strained. United by a cultish devotion to the school and their art, students were jealously divided by the pressure to outplay one another to obtain a hearing. Some crumpled under the competition; others basked in a glow of conscious exclusivity, buoyed with the pleasant sensation of filling their space well.