by Nigel Cliff
As for the faculty, they were the students a few decades on. Teachers’ reputations depended on their attracting talented pupils, and they competed shamelessly for the best. Once they had them, they hated seeing them play for colleagues or talk to members of another class. Hierarchy was engraved in brass on the doors of their studios, recording how long they had survived. Rosina Lhévinne’s nameplate bore the year 1924, when she and her husband, Josef, joined the faculty. Both had graduated with gold medals from the Moscow Conservatory in the 1890s, but after being trapped in Germany by the First World War and losing their savings in the Russian Revolution, they had sailed for America, where Josef made a sensational debut at Carnegie Hall and they taught in tandem, she bearing the brunt of the work while he was away performing and philandering. When Josef passed away in 1944, a year after his classmate and friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rosina became America’s foremost link to the golden age of Russian Romanticism. At seventy-one, she was Juilliard’s undisputed star teacher.
More perhaps than any other young American, Van revered that tradition, with its virtuosos who painted stories from the keyboard with a religious passion. To his mind, Romantic Russian music was so exquisitely, painfully beautiful that he knew it could only be the breath of God. Aside from Rildia Bee, he could not imagine studying with anyone else but Rosina, which was why he was here in the famous fourth-floor studio with its double walls and cork floor, ready to play his way into her hard-won affections.
Rosina sat in her high-backed green-upholstered chair as Van raised his huge, bony hands. They were as big as Josef’s, she noticed, big enough to play a twelfth and stretch thirteen notes, middle C to A, with long, tapered fingers that could get between the keys. But what were they doing? His left hand was drumming the opening fanfare of Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, a storm-racked chandelier of crashing chords that serious pianists were supposed to spurn. A deep, ominous tremolando, the same fanfare with the right hand, and another tremulous roll. Then the lightest chords, tripping off the fingers of his right hand while his left played the wistful melody. Both hands away, flying along the keyboard like a ballerina’s feet barely brushing the floor. A moment of tranquillity, his head back now, eyes closed, forehead creased at the exquisite beauty of the thing, his soul swelling with every note. Long before then, Rosina had her answer. The unusual boy was not only playing with startling control and power, but he was also constructing something uncommonly noble, sensitive, and heartfelt. More than that, he had a big, sweeping approach that she had not seen in years: a grand style that uncannily echoed the dashing virtuosos of her youth.
His playing thrilled a deep Russian chord in her. She found space in her class.
DURING THE Great Depression many of Morningside Heights’ apartment buildings degenerated into single-room-occupancy hotels of such squalor that they scared off even students. Neighboring Columbia University had recently begun a program of crash gentrification by buying up whole blocks and returning them to family housing, and 15 Claremont Avenue, a handsome ten-story structure three blocks from Juilliard, was one of the beneficiaries. The five-room apartment leased by Mr. and Mrs. Allen Spicer was generously sized, the room for rent had its own bath, and best of all, there was an ornate Chickering grand in the living room.
Bristle-haired Allen Spicer worked in the traffic department of the New York Telephone Company. His chubby, white-haired wife, Hazel, was secretary to the principal of a Bronx high school. They needed the extra income, but Mrs. Spicer was reluctant to take responsibility for a roomer as young as Van. Rildia Bee charmingly waved away her doubts and asked if her son might be allowed to practice on the piano for an hour or two a day. Mrs. Spicer reluctantly agreed, so long as she didn’t have to listen to scales. Van moved in, and Rildia Bee left her only child for the first time.
He loved his parents deeply, but in many ways the move was a relief. His Texas adolescence, he once admitted, had been a living hell: “You can’t love music enough to want to play it without other kids thinking you’re queer or something.” In his early teens he shot up to his full height, his shoe size nearly matching his years, and his hair kinked into an uncontrollable frizz. When unisex salons were widely regarded as abominations and the epithet longhair, signifying an artist or intellectual, was akin to sissy, he had been easy pickings for school jocks. As well as retreating still further into music, he had unburdened his awkwardness into old-fashioned poems: one, published in the National Anthology of High School Poetry in 1950, was bleakly titled “The Void.” Though he was no genius at academic work—his IQ was measured at a high but unspectacular 119—he had sweated through summer sessions in the dusty brick groves of Kilgore College to graduate high school at sixteen, twelfth in a class of 103, with the highest ratings for personality, attitude, attendance, associates, chance of success, and character, though only a “satisfactory” for leadership, and ready to get out of town as fast as he could.
Like any teenager away from home the first time, he cut loose some strings. His room was a pigsty. Every day, Rildia Bee sent him the Kilgore News Herald, and the unread copies piled up with the other clutter until it threatened to block the door. Occasionally he stayed up all night and tackled a batch. “My room looks wonderful and I’ll never let it get untidy again,” he’d vow to Hazel Spicer in the morning, but it always did. He was terrible at writing home; after weeks of silence he telephoned, reversing the charges. Against his parents’ strict precepts, he tried smoking and drinking: “Just a little rum,” he said when he joined the Spicers in their late-afternoon rum and Coke. The biggest relief after years as a special case was Juilliard’s unabashed elitism. In a place where violinists strode down the hall throwing off double-stops and triple-stops, he no longer stood out for devotion to his craft.
Yet he still stood out. It was hard not to when his blond pompadour bobbed above the heads of everyone else and his contagious laugh echoed down the hall. He was perpetually putting his paddle-like arms round anyone who came within their ambit, which disarmed most but annoyed some. A young voice student named Leontyne Price was shocked when he, a Lhévinne student, spoke to her in the cafeteria, a major arena for student showboating, where the tribes normally kept their own counsel. Then there was his Texas-ness, which he wore more strongly than the Dallas contingent, despite years of speech and drama lessons with a neighbor, Mrs. Leo Satterwhite Allen, whose son had studied with Rildia Bee. The typical Juilliard student was the son of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals raised in a wood polish world of museums and Chekhov plays and studied language. Van went round with his brightly patterned shirts and his wide, floppy collars, his southern accent and down-home humor and artless affection for everyone. “Boy, isn’t it wonderful,” he’d say, shaking his head in wonder, when he liked something. Students who considered themselves intellectuals talked down to him, but what they found most outlandish was his taste in music: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Liszt—his heroes were so cringingly unfashionable that it was hard to take him seriously as an artist. That pained him, more on account of his beloved music than his ego, which his upbringing and gentleness kept modestly bound.
Since he was dismissed as a hayseed he began playing the enfant terrible, banging out jazz and pop tunes, thumping the keyboard as if he had boxing gloves on, and fooling his classmates into thinking he coasted on his admittedly spectacular musical instincts. To the Spicers’ consternation, he started coming home in the early hours and leaving notes for Hazel: “Hello, darling! I’m home! Whee! Wake me up so I can talk to you in the morning. Love, Van.” They soon solved the mystery of his late nights. When the night caretaker at Juilliard threw Rosina’s gang out of the practice studios, Van walked with them as far as the 110th Street subway station, but instead of joining them for a beer, he took the downtown 1 train, with its screeching brakes and wicker seats, to Fifty-Seventh Street and disappeared down the service stairs at the back of a tall stone building. Squeezing past the trash cans, he tugged on a heavy sliding door and entered a
windowless basement lit by factory-style fluorescent lights and crisscrossed by pipes. There, parked against drably painted walls, were his nightly dates: a bank of several dozen nine-foot concert grands. This was the basement of Steinway Hall, where pianists on the roster of Steinway Artists could choose an instrument for their next performance from a storied fleet that included Rachmaninoff’s favorite, number CD-18. At night, after the white-coated technicians had finished their tuning and buffing, the black beauties were available for practice. Some students used the basement as a musical club, where friends gathered to dispense gossip and criticism. Van took the last time slot, when he could be alone and concentrate while the world was asleep. In the morning he was perpetually late for his nine o’clock class. This drove Rosina crazy and irritated his classmates, who thought he was dopey and pitched in to buy him a Big Ben alarm clock. He started picking up chocolates or flowers on the way to school and presenting them to Rosina with his excuses, which made him even later.
To his peers’ equal bemusement, three times a week he rode the subway to Fifty-Seventh Street to attend Calvary Baptist Church. In true New York style, the church was interrupted by its own skyscraper, with a Gothic portal supporting a dozen floors of apartments and a tower perched up high. Inside, a proscenium arch and gallery gave it the look of a Broadway theater, but the fellowship was warm, hands were raised high, and here in Mammon the living God felt present in daily life. Van’s fellow Texan Jeaneane Dowis was as suspicious as any of Van’s worn-on-the-sleeve faith, but he kept asking her out for dinner, and a free meal was not to be sniffed at. She and Jimmy Mathis, Rosina’s other Texan pianist, became Van’s best friends. Jimmy had short dark hair; a sensitive, clammy face; and a penchant for making a hysterical drama out of anything. “Well, far be it from me to say,” he’d begin in the tones of a bossy schoolmarm, before delivering an outrageous zinger. The threesome ate together at Aki Dining Room on West 119th Street, where a full dinner could be had for ninety-nine cents, gabbing all the time about the superior virtues of Texas. When they were apart, Van was on the phone with them by the hour. Mr. Spicer had a free telephone that went with his job, but he consulted his conscience, decided it was wrong to put Van’s calls on it, and installed a separate line. His conscience thanked him when Van racked up staggeringly high bills.
Many evenings, Van bought a twenty-five-cent student ticket for Carnegie Hall from Joseph Patelson Music House on Fifty-Sixth Street, a little place with bins full of out-of-print sheet music that was universally known as the half-price shop; or he and his two friends queued for seventy-five-cent standing places at the Metropolitan Opera, down on Broadway. One night at the Met, a wealthy lady beckoned him to take her spare seat down front, and from then on he bought standing but sat in an orchestra seat. Occasionally he went to the jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street, or the Village Vanguard downtown, where Ella Fitzgerald might be singing or Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson playing piano. Some said the improvised spontaneity of jazz inflected American classical music, but Van didn’t take it very seriously and liked cocktail piano and World War II songs just as well.
There was music everywhere in New York in 1951. There was everything in New York, though many neighborhoods retained a quirky small-town feel. The city was rushing with the energies unleashed after the war. The West Side piers were busy with ships and freight, the billboard lights of Times Square glowed bright, and the colleges were full of men and women on the GI program. For a young man with a few dollars chasing his dream, it was an exciting time to be alive.
IT WAS the brightest of times and the darkest of times. Cities across America were shooting skyward, but toward what future? With the map of Eurasia now overwhelmingly colored red, President Truman made it America’s overriding priority to resist at all costs what one official termed “the Kremlin’s ultimate intentions to enslave mankind.” Secret plans were drawn up for a fourfold increase in defense spending, a burgeoning of the atomic stockpile, and a possible Third World War, which experts predicted was most likely to start, and end, in 1957. In New York, schoolchildren were issued dog tags so their bodies could be identified in case of a nuclear blast, and families upstate were warned to expect a flood of refugees. “Every effort will be made to place people of similar interests with you,” officials assured them, as if Armageddon would resemble summer camp. Allegorizing how the world had got in this fix, movie theaters were showing The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which a well-meaning alien pleads for world harmony and an end to the weapons race only to meet with suspicion and violence from officials and citizens alike.
Since the human consciousness protects itself by refusing to countenance its own demise, many searched for a silver lining to the atomic cloud. In bookstores, a thin volume entitled How to Survive an Atomic Bomb was a best seller; its recommendations include practicing lying on the floor, ideally with no one watching; and wearing loose-fitting clothing and a hat to minimize burns. Reciting jingles or the multiplication table might help control fear during a nuclear attack, the book advises, but, in any case, life should be back to normal within a month or two. In an even more Pollyannaish vein, an engineer drew up plans for giant subterranean elevators that would lower New York City’s skyscrapers in an atomic emergency; he calculated that the Empire State Building could be dropped as far as the eighty-sixth floor in fifty-eight seconds, “leaving only the tower unprotected to avoid expense of added cellar depth.” Others saw in atomic energy not the flash of extinction but a dazzling future of cheap power, mass leisure, and a cultural and intellectual renaissance. Families would live in houses heated and cooled by walls of radioactive uranium and lit by panels glowing with the “fluorescence which occurs around U-235.” They would brush their teeth with atomic toothpaste, eat crops grown with radioactive fertilizer and meat from giant mutant cattle, and drive atomic cars that ran for a year on “a pellet of atomic energy the size of a vitamin pill.” One expert proposed melting the polar ice cap by bombing the Arctic, gifting “the entire world a moister, warmer climate” and opening vast areas for development; others suggested leveling the Rocky Mountains with atom bombs to increase rainfall across the Great Plains and using the weapons “generally to tidy up the awkward parts of the world.” This was a brave new era limited only by man’s imagination—and by reality, which soon set in. “If an atomic-powered taxi hit an atomic-powered streetcar at Forty-second and Lex,” explained the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a publication not renowned for dryness, “it would completely destroy the whole Grand Central area.” Melting the ice cap, Science Digest pointed out, would be not only calamitous, but also ruinously expensive. Domestic applications of atomic power sources, noted Scientific American, were limited by the inconvenient fact that they weighed a minimum of twenty tons, excluding the cooling system and radiation shield.
Faced with such impossible calculations, most people did the only sensible thing: they tuned out, hoped for the best, and got on with their lives.
INSIDE ROOM 412 it was evilly hot. Rosina was a famous hypochondriac and sat wrapped in shawls, winter and summer, against imaginary drafts. “Open the window a little less!” she croaked if someone dared nudge it. When her full complement of fifteen or twenty students crammed into the studio, they begged her to step outside while they aired it.
Behind the two pianos hung a small portrait of Josef Lhévinne and a bigger one of Anton Rubinstein. In 1889, the year she met Josef, when she (then Rosina Bessie) was nine and he (then Josef Levin) was fourteen and had shown up at her door as a substitute piano teacher, Rubinstein selected Josef to play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto under his baton and, at the end, publicly embraced him, declaring him his successor. The rest of their story was legend. Rosina followed Josef into the conservatory, and a week after her graduation they married. Friends gave the marriage a year at most, but when Rosina overheard a remark that she was the better pianist of the two, she immediately stopped playing and devoted herself to Josef’s career. It was in search of opportunities for him
that they moved to western Europe and Frenchified their name from Levin to Lhévinne.
In class, Rosina presided from her green chair, which was known as “the throne,” her short, wavy hair augmented with a steel-gray wig that sometimes lost its moorings. Behind the little-old-lady act lay a complex character. She was both a cuddly matriarch who shamelessly matchmade lonely first-year students and a master manipulator who kept control by withholding praise and playing classmates against one another. She told earthy jokes and pealed with laughter, but also suffered bouts of depression that left her coldly inscrutable, “with hooded eyes like a dour toad.” Her advice changed with her mood, but if a student dared complain, she waved it off: “Certainly, you know, that was Monday and today is Friday,” she’d purr in her thick Russian accent. She had a famously tortured relationship with the English language. When a journalist asked how she prepared for a concert, she replied, “After a little practice and a simple lunch I go to my room to rest and finger my passages.”
On the subject of Romantic music, she was oracular. She taught the old Russian style, gently regularized to suit American tastes, which to Van was second nature. Since bravura pieces were easy for him, she started him with Mozart’s Sonata in E-flat Major and Bach’s Partita in E Minor. “Very talented, quick, not very accurate,” she noted on a page headed “Cliburn, Harvey” in one of the little ring binders she used in class. They moved on to Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven; and then Hindemith, Schumann, and Prokofiev. Like all the best students, Van had arrived a fully formed musician, and her interventions were modest, but he responded so strongly and felt the music so deeply that she began to look forward to their Friday 11:00 a.m. sessions with great joy. One day she suggested a different approach to a Chopin piece, and he got up and paced the room. “It’s too beautiful,” he said. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.”