Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  15railroad station agent: TM1.

  16“Business is lamentable”: Rachmaninoff to Eugene Somov, November 15, 1932, quoted in Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 290.

  17Shreveport paper: Sunflower Daly, “Rachmaninoff Wins by Large Margin in Monday Night Game,” ST, November 15, 1932.

  17how that happened: Van and Rildia Bee told the story many times, with minor variations. My main source is Peter Rosen’s interview with Rildia Bee, VCA.

  18regular lessons: TM1.

  18“Now, when we’re taking a lesson”: Ibid. The lesson routine is from the same dispatch.

  18“Well, son, we’ll see about that”: Van Cliburn, quoted in VC, 10.

  18medical missionary: John Davidson, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” Texas Monthly 15, no. 5 (May 1987): 172. Other sources quoted Harvey as simply wanting Van to be a doctor: see TM1.

  19“Mommy, Daddy, take me there”: VCG.

  19born a Texan: Rildia Bee Cliburn interview, VCA.

  20draw off their neighbors’ crude: Stanley Walker, “Kilgore Has Oil and Van Cliburn, Too,” NYT Magazine, September 23, 1962.

  20ten thousand dollars: TM2.

  20old family friend: Gay, “Rildia Cliburn, Mother of Famed Pianist, Dies.”

  20tiny one-story white house: Tom Martin superciliously describes the house and its contents in TM2.

  21“Van, you have such long hands”: TM1.

  22“superior” fifteen times: Ibid.

  22“I can’t play . . . and God”: Van Cliburn, “What Is Success?” Guideposts Magazine, February 1959.

  22“Well, you know . . . wonderful”: Van Cliburn, interview by Paul Holdengräber, May 15, 2012, http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/live-nypl-christies-present-van-cli burn-conversation-paul-holdengräber.

  22“Well, all right then”: TM1.

  23“It hurts me” . . . “help me”: Van Cliburn, interview by Paul Holdengräber.

  23nosebleeds: TM1. They began at age eight, when Van contracted scarlet fever.

  23taxi driver: Ibid. Another possibility was a preacher.

  24insured for a million dollars: As remembered by Coach Bradford. Gay, “Rildia Cliburn, Mother of Famed Pianist, Dies.”

  24Bob Waters . . . C. L. Newsome: TM1.

  24Mr. Belvedere: TM2.

  24Thespian Club . . . Spanish Club . . . Student Council: TM1.

  24Winifred Hamilton: Ibid. Martin interviewed Michael Gehlen, the other student with a crush on her.

  24“You already have the best teacher”: Dolores Fredrickson, “Van Cliburn Remembers His Remarkable Mother,” Clavier, March 1996.

  25“Sonny Boy”: Davidson, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” 172.

  25two-hundred-dollar prize: PFJA. A handwritten note in the same file puts the prize money at $250.

  25with the Houston Symphony Orchestra: On April 12, 1947. Sound recording txu-hs-0048, “Houston Symphony Concert, Apr. 12, 1947,” Austin Fine Arts Library, University of Texas.

  26“the warmonger and imperialist oppressor”: Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken (London: Little, Brown, 2008), 259.

  27Central Committee . . . issued a resolution: These events began in January 1948, after Stalin reacted violently to the opera Velikaya druzhba (The Great Friendship), by Vano Muradeli. The recriminations spread in numerous meetings, the Central Committee decree of February 10, and the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers, held April 19–28. See Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 122–51; Per Skans, “The 1948 Formalism Campaign,” in Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (London: Pimlico, 2006), 322–34; and Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972), 213–28.

  27“grunting and scraping”: Martin Sixsmith, “The Secret Rebel,” Guardian, July 15, 2006.

  27“muddled, nerve-wracking”: Tomoff, Creative Union, 123.

  27“enemies of Russian music”: Ibid.

  28“Once again . . . criticism”: Letter to Sovetskaya Muzyka, 1948, quoted in Rasmussen, Sviatoslav Richter, 124.

  28“Jump thru the window”: Terry Klefstad, “Shostakovich and the Peace Conference,” Music &Politics 6, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

  28“bag of ticks and grimaces”: Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber, 1994), 462.

  28“hatemongers . . . outright war”: NYT, March 28, 1949.

  29“suave radio baritone”: Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 204.

  29“not a free man”: Ibid., 205.

  29including classical music: At various times Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lena Horne, and Dimitri Mitropoulos were under investigation.

  29“It’s by Rimsky-Korsakov”: Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 196.

  2: ROOM 412

  31“Honey . . . ah’ve come to study with y’all”: There are several versions of this well-known line: “Ah’ve come to study with ya’ll, honey” (Jeaneane Dowis Lipman, “Rosina: A Memoir,” The American Scholar 65, no. 3 [Summer 1996]: 373); “Honey, I’m here to study with you” (VCL, 48); and “Honey, Ah’m goin’ to study with you” (“The All-American Virtuoso,” Time, May 19, 1958).

  31Catherine the Great . . . droshky driver: Harold Schonberg, quoted in Robert K. Wallace, A Century of Music-Making: The Lives of Josef and Rosina Lhévinne (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1976), 268.

  31He had telephoned her: This is one of those small but telling stories that survive in several different forms, presumably to drive biographers mad. Rosina told Abram Chasins about the phone call for his 1959 book. Van, on the other hand, told Howard Reich for his 1993 biography that this conversation took place in person, and Reich places it prior to the Juilliard entrance examinations, where he suggests Rosina heard Van play and decided to accept him. It seems unlikely that Van would have been assigned a teacher before he had auditioned for a place at the school, and Reich’s version is also contradicted by the information of Jeaneane Dowis and, further on in Reich’s book, of Josef Raeiff, who states that he was appointed Van’s teacher when Van started at the school. Rosina told both Chasins and Robert K. Wallace the story of the impromptu meeting by the elevator, and she told both that some of her students convinced her to give Van a hearing, which seems to have been a private affair and not part of the entrance auditions. So much is confirmed by a letter Rildia Bee wrote to Rosina shortly after Thanksgiving Day 1951, in which she noted that Van “would have been terribly disappointed had you not ‘squeezed’ him into your class.” The comment would have been redundant had Rildia Bee already known that Van was enrolled with Rosina when she arrived with him at the start of the semester. In her notes for an interview, Rosina writes of Van, “When he was 17 years old . . . he arrived in N.Y., two of my pupils introduced him to me and he said that he wanted to study with me.” It appears that Van conflated three episodes in his memory—the school audition, the telephone call, and the private audition for Rosina—possibly to make a more decorous scene out of the confusion. I have made my best stab at adjudicating between the accounts. See VC, 41–42; VCL, 47–48; Dowis, “Rosina: A Memoir,” 373; Wallace, Century of Music-Making, 270; Rildia Bee O’Bryan Cliburn, letter to Rosina Lhévinne, n.d. [December 1951], Folder 19, Box 2, RLP; Rosina Lhévinne notes for an interview, Folder 17B, Box 29, RLP.

  31During three summers: Van attended the Juilliard School in the summers of 1947, 1948 (studying with Ernest Hutcheson), and 1951 (studying with Carl Friedberg).

  33gold medals: Josef graduated top of his piano class, ahead of his classmates Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff, who won the even more prestigious Great Gold Medal for composition.

  35five-room apartment: The description and the following information about Van’s life with the Spicers are taken from SH.


  35“You can’t love music enough”: “All-American Virtuoso.”

  35a high but unspectacular 119: TM1 gives Van’s academic credentials.

  36Leontyne Price: Interview by Peter Rosen, Reels 38 and 39, Van Cliburn—Concert Pianist elements, VCA. This vital collection includes many detailed interviews for Rosen’s 1994 documentary, which was originally broadcast on the A&E Network’s Biography.

  36Mrs. Leo Satterwhite Allen: VC, 18.

  36“Boy, isn’t it wonderful”: Mark Schubart, quoted in SH.

  37Steinway Hall: At 113 West Fifty-Seventh Street; when the building was sold to Manhattan Life Insurance Company, the number was changed to 111.

  38“Well, far be it from me to say”: Robert White, interview with the author, February 28, 2015.

  38a wealthy lady: TM2.

  39“Kremlin’s ultimate intentions”: William L. Laurence, quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 340. Born in Lithuania, Laurence was the official historian of the Manhattan Project.

  39Secret plans: Secret report NSC-68, issued April 14, 1950, President’s Secretary’s File, Truman Papers, Truman Library.

  39Third World War: Code-named “Operation Dropshot”; first circulated in 1949.

  39“Every effort will be made”: Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 323.

  39How to Survive an Atomic Bomb: Published in New York by Bantam, 1950. The author, Richard Gerstell, was billed as a consultant with the Civil Defense Office.

  40“leaving only the tower”: Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 320.

  40“fluorescence which occurs around U-235”: Ibid., 110.

  40“a pellet of atomic energy”: Ibid., 112.

  40“the entire world a moister, warmer climate”: Ibid., 111.

  40“generally to tidy up”: S. Chase, The Nation, December 22, 1945.

  40“If an atomic-powered taxi”: Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 115.

  40Science Digest . . . Scientific American: Ibid., 115–16.

  40Inside Room 412: My account of Rosina at Juilliard draws on Dowis, “Rosina: A Memoir”; The Legacy of Rosina Lhévinne, film dir. Salome Ramras Arkatov, 2003, DVD, Kultur, 2011; and my interviews with Van’s contemporaries Martin Canin and Howard Aibel, conducted September 26 and October 16, 2014, respectively. The following quotations are from Dowis.

  42“Very talented, quick, not very accurate”: Folder 10, Box 27, RLP.

  42with great joy: Joseph W. Polisi, “The Broad Palette of Van Cliburn’s Life,” Juilliard Journal, April 2013. “He is a great joy to work with . . . [possessing a] most unusual virtuoso talent [but] with it shows remarkable sensitivity,” Rosina wrote in a teacher report.

  42“It’s too beautiful”: Wallace, Century of Music-Making, 271.

  42earned him three hundred dollars: PFJA.

  42six-hundred-dollar Juilliard grant: Ibid. The grant was in the name of Olga Samaroff.

  42“Harvey Levan”: Ibid.

  43“Excellent talent”: Folder 2, Box 27, RLP.

  43“But Tchaikovsky”: Dowis, “Rosina: A Memoir,” 375.

  44“Well, we don’t really”: Josef Raeiff, quoted in VC, 61.

  44played the concerto: On January 23, 1953.

  44graded him “Excellent”: Folder 11, Box 27, RLP.

  44his own showcase: VC, 55.

  45double protection: Though the change was unusually dramatic, there were precedents: the prominent British pianist, conductor, and composer Ethel Leginska (1886–1970) was born Ethel Liggins in Hull, Yorkshire, while the British pianist Marguérite de Pachmann (1865–1952) was born Maggie Okey in Australia.

  3: THE SUCCESSOR

  47dusk on March 1, 1953: My account of Stalin’s death is based primarily on the firsthand account of the guard Pavel Lozgachev in Edward Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 549–60. Also used were KM, 145–52; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 564–77; Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, trans. Ellen Dahrendorf (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 1–33; Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 103; Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 236–37. The accounts often conflict: for instance Khrushchev says he arrived at Stalin’s dacha early in the morning on March 2 with Malenkov, Beria, and Bulganin, whereas Lozgachev says only the first two showed up and that Khrushchev arrived four hours later.

  48“Beat them . . . into powder”: Montefiore, Stalin, 558.

  48“It has been established”: Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2001), 64. The services named were those of America and Britain.

  48“feverishly preparing”: Pravda, January 13, 1958, quoted in Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 427.

  48head of the secret police: The Soviet security service was known as the MGB, or Ministry for State Security, from 1946 to 1954, when it was replaced with the KGB, the Committee for State Security.

  49“When Stalin says dance”: KR, 301.

  49“One never knows”: Montefiore, Stalin, 471.

  49warbling “Mikita”: KM, 146.

  51“Come in, don’t be shy”: Montefiore, Stalin, 572.

  52“He sort of smiled”: KM, 149.

  52Molotov saw a flash: Gromyko, Memoirs, 103.

  52“twisted by ambition”: Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 7–8.

  52“Which specialist”: Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990), 213.

  53“Listen, please stop that”: KM, 151.

  53“Khrustalev, the car”: Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 8.

  53“He’s off to take power”: Montefiore, Stalin, 576, quoting Anastas Mikoyan, Tak bylo (Moscow: AST, 2000), 587.

  53familiar voice: That of Yuri Levitan. See Victor Zorza, “How Moscow Broke the News of Stalin’s Death,” Guardian, March 7, 1953.

  54“Thank you, Comrade Stalin”: Tzouliadis, Forsaken, 183.

  54“I’m finished”: KR, 307.

  54temporary people: Ibid.

  55“Our father is dead”: Vladimir Ashkenazy, quoted in Stuart Jeffries, “Back in the USSR,” Guardian, November 8, 2002.

  55Sviatoslav Richter: For this episode, see Richter’s recollections in Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 4–6, and in Bruno Monsaingeon’s 1998 film Richter, the Enigma.

  55two thousand died: David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 191.

  56trumped-up charges: A military panel of the Supreme Court of the USSR rehabilitated Teofil Rikhter in 1962.

  57telephone number or apartment number: Paul Moor, “Sviatoslav Richter: Sequestered Genius,” High Fidelity 8, no. 10 (October 1958): 49–50.

  57plastic lobster: Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 141.

  58“And what a cruel—tragic—coincidence:” Simon Morrison, Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 271. Lina would be released in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech.

  60“I did him in”: Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 237. Or so Molotov claimed; like the others, he had an interest in justifying Beria’s execution.

  60underage girls: By one count, Beria had 760 mistresses, and for at least a few, his clammy embrace was the kiss of death. Larissa Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives: The Secret Lives of the Women Behind the Kremlin Walls—From Lenin to Gorbachev, trans. Cathy Porter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 185; Martin Sixsmith, Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East (London: BBC, 2011), 396.

  60“We wiped our noses”: KR, 266.
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br />   60“Beria is getting his knives ready” . . . “What steps can we take”: KM, 189.

  61meeting of the Presidium: Khrushchev’s account of the events (KM, 189–200) was for a long time the only source. Records subsequently came to light that prove it to be selective and occasionally misleading. Mark Kramer presents the evidence in “Leadership Succession and Political Violence in the USSR Following Stalin’s Death,” in Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 69–92.

  61“flung himself about the courtroom”: General Ivan Konev, the presiding judge at the trial, quoted in Tzouliadis, Forsaken, 313.

  61got drunk and beat up the local militiaman: Harrison E. Salisbury, “Russia Re-Viewed: Life of a Soviet Common Man Is a Constant Struggle,” NYT, September 24, 1954.

  62“not especially bright”: Mayers, The Ambassadors, 199.

  62“rumbustious, impetuous . . . words of one syllable”: William Hayter, A Double Life: The Memoirs of Sir William Hayter (London: Penguin, 1974), 114.

  62“For so long”: Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, trans. Max Hayward (London: Collins, 1978), 142.

  4: VAN CLIBURN DAYS

  63Rosemary Butts: Tom Martin interviewed her; see TM1. She was then Mrs. Corwin C. Reeves, wife of a Texas Tech geology professor.

  63fifteen hundred East Texans: VCL, 54–55.

  64check for six hundred dollars: TM1.

  64“East Texas Days”: On November 17 and 18, 1953. Pericles Alexander, “‘East Texas Days’ Named for Cliburn,” ST, November 13, 1953; “Cliburn to Receive Honor,” KNH, November 16, 1953.

  64“seemed barely able”: VCL, 52.

  64“After all . . . Texans are dumb”: Mark Schubart, quoted in SH.

  65“I’ve never done this” . . . “hearing about him”: VCL, 58.

  65Van was swept away: Harlow Robinson, The Last Impresario: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sol Hurok (New York: Viking, 1994), 333.

  65overtures to Hurok: In “American Sputnik,” Time, April 28, 1958, Van revealed (probably not expecting it to be printed) that Hurok had passed him up. While still at Juilliard, he was confident enough to enter Hurok’s name as his manager on his Placement File.