by Nigel Cliff
In the first days of the Tchaikovsky International Piano and Violin Festival, when he emerged from among forty-nine contestants here as the darling of the serious listeners and bobby-soxers alike, they called him “the American genius.”
Now that he has won the contest, the Russians have dubbed him “Malchik [little boy] from the South.”
Both titles seem apt. Despite his slender six-foot four-inch frame, Mr. Cliburn, who is 23 years old, is boyish in appearance. He has a small face, with a sharp nose and clear blue eyes tucked under a thick head of blond, curly hair.
He was born in Shreveport, La. His speech betrays the fact that he has not been away too long from his “daddy,” who lives in Kilgore, Tex., where Van spent his early years . . .
Mr. Cliburn brought to the stage of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory a formidable talent, combining great technical skill with a robust and crowd-appealing emotional style. And that is comparable to bringing a copy of Marx to the Kremlin.
In Morningside Heights, Allen Spicer stared wonderingly at the papers. A few years ago he had berated Van for never reading them, and now the boy was the lead news. He called out to Hazel: “That’s great,” they agreed. “At last he can afford that piano he bought for the church.” Yet, as he read on, the Old Princetonian might have begun to wonder what his former roomer had gotten himself into. In the same issue, the Times ran an editorial headed THE ARTS AS BRIDGES that suggested that artists such as Van might succeed where politicians had so conspicuously failed in spanning the gulf of hostility and misunderstanding between the superpowers. It was a noble sentiment, but in a world of sputniks and ICBMs, it placed a crushing burden on tender shoulders.
As Van’s victory became a lead story on every global outlet, many eyes turned to watch his next step. At the State Department, Secretary Dulles ordered officers to report on the young pianist’s personality, attitude, and reliability. In the Kremlin, the Central Committee began a detailed investigation of his case. The KGB opened a file on him, and so did the FBI. Journalists knocked on the Spicers’ door, interviewed Harvey Cliburn’s bank manager, and camped out on the Cliburns’ little lawn.
In Van’s Moscow hotel room, the phone kept ringing, though he was hardly ever there to pick up. Sol Hurok had swung into action, sending one telegram to his friend Max Frankel asking to be put in touch with the young hero and another to Mark Schubart congratulating him on his signal service to American culture. Rather than wait, Hurok cabled Van, who had fruitlessly pursued him for so long, with an offer of management that somehow leaked to the American press. RCA Victor, America’s leading classical label, also cabled Schubart, asking “that he use his good offices to explain to Van Cliburn” that they had made a formal proposal for his services as a recording artist. When Columbia Records and every other major label joined the chase, Van briskly instructed Bill Judd to play them off against one another—so that “if I go in one day and want to play ‘Clair de lune,’ they’ll have to record it.”
He had come to Moscow to marvel at St. Basil’s Cathedral, indulge in the music he adored, and perhaps, just perhaps, revive his floundering career. Instead he had become a worldwide phenomenon and had been handed an opportunity, and a responsibility, that no classical musician in history ever had. The prize giving that was about to take place was not the end of a crazy adventure: it was only the beginning.
• 10 •
“American Sputnik”
AT THE Peking Hotel, Harriet Wingreen had gone to sleep when there was a tremendous banging on her door. She opened up to find Van in a fluster.
“Let me in, Harriet. Let me in fast! I’ve gotta get in!” he blurted.
“What’s the matter, Van?” she mumbled.
“The girls are all after me!” he exclaimed. They were following him everywhere, and one had mysteriously appeared in his room in the dead of night.
Harriet closed the door and considered the situation: Van’s six-foot-four frame, her five feet, the couch, the bed. “Van, all right, you take the bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch,” she said sleepily. He spent the night and left the next morning, slipping out early and looking anxiously around.
It was a bright Monday morning, the spring sun suddenly flaring like a match struck in the dark. Later on, the mercury was expected to scale the unfamiliar heights of six degrees Celsius, and the lilac and apple were flowering ahead of time. At midday Van gingerly emerged beneath the stone shot-putter and wrestler and attempted to head off for the official announcement of the results. As soon as he was spotted—which was, after all, not hard—the cry went up, and a crowd of devotees swarmed over holding out hand-knitted socks and hats and jars of jam. Some had heard reports that he had lost ten pounds while in Moscow, and in a country where fruit was a great luxury, his fans shyly proffered bags of oranges.
At the conservatory most of the students had missed the night’s activity and were milling round in confusion. “So Cliburn didn’t win first prize after all,” a young Soviet violinist ruefully thought as he arrived for class, noting the tense atmosphere. It turned out that the rumor had reached them several days late that the first prize was to be split so “Iron Lev” could come out on top after all. When the doors opened, they piled into the White Hall, which was soon crammed with contestants, judges, officials, students, fans, musicians, guests, photographers, and reporters, all noisily swapping the latest news.
“Dear comrades and guests,” Emil Gilels began. “We have all come here on this sunny spring day in order to announce the joyful news with which we have been preoccupied for a long time.” He praised the competitors, lamented the jury’s difficult job, and began to read out the results:
“First prize, which includes twenty-five thousand rubles and a gold medal, to Van Cliburn, USA.”
At Van’s name, screams of joy, wild applause, and chants of “Vanya!” burst out. The two men hugged and kissed, the flashbulbs popped, and Van blew a kiss to the room. Eventually Gilels was allowed to continue. The second-prize winners received twenty thousand rubles and a silver medal; the third-prize winner, fifteen thousand rubles and a bronze medal; and the rest, cash awards of descending value. As a mark of the exceptionally high level of playing, Gilels added, five violinists and five pianists who had failed to reach the finals were to receive diplomas and cash. Six semifinalists, including Jerry Lowenthal, collected honorary certificates. Then a series of judges stood up to praise the courage and talent of the winners, give a few career tips, and wish the losers better luck in the future. All declared that for quality of artistry and technique, there had never been a competition like it.
As soon as the speeches were over, the press set upon Van.
“What is your father?” asked a reporter from Trud, a mass-circulation trade union newspaper. “Is he a worker?”
“He is a worker,” Van replied, not mentioning the word oil.
“What is your mother?”
“She teaches piano.”
“Ah yes, good,” the reporter said, nodding.
A journalist for the United Press wire service pointed out that, under Soviet law, Van might not be able to take home his winnings. “Money doesn’t mean anything to me,” he cheerfully replied. “There are so many things you cannot buy with it. Winning just means a great deal to me as an American. I would not take a million for this trip.” The reporter asked what he wanted to do next. “I would really like to go back to Texas,” he said. “I’m just about to break down.” Max Frankel thought Van was basking in the attention, and he was not altogether wrong. For all his shyness, Van finally had a leading role that he was being allowed to play. It took the journalist and his friends more than an hour to drag him away for a snack. Afterward, Van sneaked in an hour’s practice, watched by Naum and Eddik, the other Soviet competitors, and the press. Paul Moor snapped him kissing the matronly babushka who cleaned his studio, which was filled with fresh blossoms sent by admiring girls. The photojournalist was now acting as Van’s unofficial manager, at the request of his parents, w
ho trusted him because he was from Texas. Norman Shetler watched Moor and decided he was busy inveigling his way into Van’s confidence for his own purposes. Shetler resolved to stick by Van and help where he could.
As the news spread, passersby stopped anyone who looked American to congratulate them on their victory. Across the country, people gathered round TV sets and avidly swapped rumors about what kind of political influence had been brought to bear and by whom. The possibility that the public’s wishes had had an effect was almost too much to hope for; the likelihood that the decision had been made purely on artistic merits was not taken seriously.
Back at the hotel, Harriet Wingreen knocked on Van’s door to see if he had survived. No one opened it, so she kept knocking. Eventually Norman Shetler peeked out and said, “Oh it’s you—come in quick.” Fans had tried to storm the room in their enthusiasm to see and touch Van. Record companies and managers had been calling nonstop, and all the while, Van had been trying to put a call through to Kilgore.
“Have you heard the news?” he asked when he was finally connected. Rildia Bee assured him that they had; first from a friend in Shreveport, where it arrived on the wire service, and then from CBS, whose representative called from New York and offered to patch her and Harvey through to Moscow.
“It’s official,” Van proudly stressed. He reassured her that the Russians were being wonderful and asked if she had told a lady across town who ran the Community Concert Association about his win. “Honey, she already knows,” Rildia Bee replied, and when he ascertained that a family friend in the next town also knew, he felt he had finally made it. He had to ring off then, because at five he was due at the Kremlin for a diplomatic reception for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. Ambassador Thompson had offered to take him, but at the last minute Jane Thompson called and apologized, saying her husband had to be out of town. “But I’ll be taking you to the Kremlin for the reception,” she said brightly, adding that she had just heard Khrushchev was still away, so unfortunately Van wouldn’t get to meet him. Van was excited enough to meet a queen, and Jane sped over in her car. A few minutes later they drove under the Borovitskaya Tower and up into the red citadel whose jumble of palaces, churches, and barracks seemed to breathe the chivalrous and brutal, civilized and archaic, materialistic and spiritual epic of Russian history. It was a curious thing for a Westerner to enter these precincts, though the towers topped with red stars brought back half a memory of Kilgore’s derricks with their Christmas lights.
At the top of the hill, several historic buildings were being razed to make way for Khrushchev’s vast new Palace of Congresses, but the car headed for the wedding cake yellow and white of the Romanovs’ Great Kremlin Palace. The double eagles had long been ripped off and replaced with hammers and sickles, but the reception halls had lost none of their jaw-dropping extravagance. A host of officials, including Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and new foreign minister Andrei Gromyko were in attendance, but all eyes flowed toward Van, even when Voroshilov, increasingly doddery but still the nominal head of state, entered with the queen. When Van was presented to her, she lavished praise on his performance and invited him to play at the Brussels World’s Fair, which was opening that Thursday.
Suddenly a short, rotund man in a baggy suit waddled out of a side door and caught Jane Thompson’s attention. “Van!” she whispered in surprise, “Khrushchev is here.” The premier’s tall, blond son, Sergei, and small, dark interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev followed him into the hall. A functionary approached Van. Officially, Comrade Khrushchev was to greet the contestants at a reception the following afternoon, the man explained, but as a most highly esteemed guest, would Van like to meet him now?
Before Van could properly respond, Khrushchev bore down on him, grinning so broadly that he exposed a mouthful of steel, and threw his arms round him. The Soviet leader stood five foot three, and his belly was in the way, so he had to jump a little to kiss Van on one cheek and jump again to kiss him on the other, even though Van subtly bent his knees. Cameras greedily snapped.
Khrushchev righted himself, still grinning.
“Why are you so tall?” he asked, with Sukhodrev translating.
“Because I am from Texas,” Van returned.
“You must have a lot of yeast in Texas,” Khrushchev said with a chuckle, introducing a subject close to his heart. His favorite snack was a double-yeasted dough that he liked best fried as pirozhki.
“No, just vitamin pills,” Van managed, perhaps thinking of his fast-depleting supplies.
“How old are you?” the premier asked.
“I am twenty-three,” Van replied, with all the dignity his sweet child’s face could muster.
“My son is also twenty-three,” Khrushchev said, pushing Sergei forward.
“What month was he born?” Van asked.
“I must ask his mother about that,” the Soviet leader said, grinning. Sergei was his favorite, but he had never been the most doting of fathers.
“Was it July?” Van suggested.
“Probably July,” Khrushchev agreed. He neglected to add that Sergei was a rocket scientist engaged in building missiles that were designed to pulverize Western cities.
The situation was unreal; politics aside, one only had to imagine the likelihood of an incumbent American president dropping by after a music competition and going out of his way to engage the winner in banter. It was about to get stranger.
“I was listening to you in the second round on the radio in Hungary,” Khrushchev said. “I loved the way you played the F minor Fantasy opus 49 of Chopin.”
Van was stunned into silence. He looked at the warty, gap-toothed premier, suspecting he was being tricked. He turned to the smooth Sukhodrev, wondering if the interpreter had made it up. But Sukhodrev was only two years older than Van, and it seemed unlikely that he knew such an obscure piece, either.
“What did he say?” Van asked.
“He said he was so thrilled that in the second round you played the F Minor Fantasy by Chopin,” Sukhodrev repeated.
No American musician thought of being part of the mainstream of national life. Yet here was a superpower leader, treating Van as an equal and speaking appreciatively of a piece as delicate and refined as the Chopin F Minor Fantaisie. Van began feeling he was in a musical paradise.
The reception over, the entire party moved on to the conservatory for the formal award ceremony. Onstage, the competition officials were ranged behind a long table. Shostakovich opened the session. Reformers were convinced the composer was a secret dissident, his music a subversive commentary on the sins of Soviet society, but as usual he made a safe speech, praising the talented artists who, he said, held aloft the banner of true art, and declaring that the competition would take its place in the history of music. Nervous, fidgety, and tetchy, he chewed his nails and fingers, twitched his chin, wrinkled his nose to push up the thick glasses that veiled his eyes, stuttered as he spoke through tight lips, and with an expression on his pallid face unfathomably balanced between courage and doubt, irritation and moroseness, betrayed no hint of what he was thinking. Van had no idea of Shostakovich’s past troubles and merely thought the composer was very kind, interesting, and nice.
Dmitri Kabalevsky handed out the prizes, to a ringing ovation. Minister of Culture Mikhailov took the podium to declare Moscow the world capital of music and announced that the Tchaikovsky Competition would henceforth be held every four years. Efrem Zimbalist was dragged on to make a short speech, presumably to quash rumors of his rebellion. Valery Klimov, the winning violinist, thanked the government and the Communist Party, on behalf of the Soviet participants, for their unswerving commitment to the training of young talent. Finally, Van tried out a few lines in Russian. “Dear friends,” he said, “I’m very grateful to the audience for inspiring me. Thank you very much.” Everyone laughed and cheered. He felt thrilled of course, as if he had been rewarded for twenty years’ hard labor, given a passport to explore new places and meet wonderful people. Yet, at th
e same time, he felt strangely guilty and discomposed. He had heard and so admired the beautiful performances by some of the other participants, including the three Soviet winners. It was so much easier to praise others than to bear the responsibility of winning. As Mother always said, when it came down to it, the stage was a lonely place.
Besides, the Soviets were his friends now. Even Iron Lev had turned out to be all warmth and enthusiasm. When he approached Van, his face lit up with childlike candor, and his booming voice and infectious laugh made it impossible not to like him. Lev had brought along Ella and their young daughters, Irina and Natasha, and during the prize giving, Irina clambered onstage. She was ordered down and started crying, so Lev gave her his silver medal to play with and Van took her on his knee.
After the presentation the top winners of the violin and piano competitions performed, the latter clearly at a higher level than the former, with Kondrashin again conducting the Moscow State Symphony. Van was last, with the first movement of the Tchaikovsky. For the first time, Liu Shikun listened properly, his heroic months of rehearsal finally over, and he was stunned. He had never heard anyone play the piano as if he were making it up, freely ignoring the markings and sending opposites—dark and light, fast and slow, strong and gentle—into spiraling collisions. He vowed that from then on he would liberate his own style. Soviet pianists, among them young Sergei Dorensky, also fell under Van’s spell, realizing that Russian music could be more melodic and dramatic than the Soviet school, with its intense focus on virtuosity, allowed. Not all praised Van unreservedly. There was a drop of bad taste in his unabashed Romanticism, sniffed Heinrich Neuhaus, even though he had voted for him and publicly called him a genius. Lev Vlassenko privately agreed, though he, too, had much to think about. “The competition has demonstrated that one should not be afraid to sincerely express the feeling which is dormant in one’s soul,” he reflected to a journalist. “Sometimes I feel too embarrassed to show it.” The musical unbuttoning echoed what millions of ordinary Russians already felt.