Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (17 page)

AMONG THAT
year’s Music Panel applicants was a striking young pianist from Los Angeles named
Olegna Fuschi, who asked for a grant to take part in the Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition. The psychological warfare people were keen to assist Americans in competing abroad, but
Washington had vetoed it, in part because of the difficulty of identifying winners.
Fuschi was turned down but went anyway. One of the Rio judges was a Russian pianist, Pavel Serebryakov, who had also been named as a judge for the forthcoming piano competition in Moscow. He had brought along a pile of brochures and application forms in various languages, and he gave a packet to Fuschi, saying he hoped she would come.

The large brochure was a luxury production that clearly heralded an important event. The royal blue cover bore a cameo of Tchaikovsky above the title
INTERNATIONAL PIANO AND VIOLIN COMPETITION NAMED AFTER TCHAIKOVSKY
. Inside were thirty-six pages lavishly illustrated with photographs of the composer, his birthplace, his house in Klin, his scores, his statue in front of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Great Hall of the conservatory from various angles, and the large Moscow concert venue named Tchaikovsky Hall. There was no mistaking Russia’s pride in its most famous composer, and there was no arguing with the stature of those behind the competition. Heading the Organizing Committee was Dmitri Shostakovich, now restored to first place in the Soviet pantheon. The
always reliable Emil Gilels was chairman of the jury, which also included the highly unreliable but celebrated Sviatoslav Richter. After the programs for pianists and violinists, the brochure ended with a list of the eight prizes on offer, ranging from 25,000 rubles ($6,250 at the official 1957 exchange rate) and a gold medal to 5,000 rubles and a badge of honor.

Fuschi leafed through the brochure and then packed it in her bag. When she got back to New York, she brought it to the first lesson of the new school year and showed it to her teacher, Rosina Lhévinne. Rosina thanked Olenychika, as she called Fuschi, and turned over the pages. Still holding it, she walked slowly to the window and stared out. Very softly, half to herself, she said:

“Van.”

Oblivious to Olenychika’s interest in going herself, she dictated a letter to him. “I promise, they will love you,” it ended. Then she consulted Bill Schuman. “Are you sure he’s the right one?” the Juilliard president asked, and Rosina replied that he was, out of those in her class. Besides, she added, “I feel he vould make a
vonderful
representative of America in Moscow. He has the personality as well as the talent.”

Around the same time, the handsome brochure arrived at the Fifty-Seventh Street offices of Steinway and Sons. Sascha Greiner, the veteran head of the Concert and Artist Department, picked up
the phone and called Kilgore. A German-Latvian refugee from revolutionary Russia who had originally been hired to communicate with Vladimir Horowitz before the mercurial pianist learned English, Greiner was himself a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory.
“You must go, Van!” he exclaimed excitedly. Van had already received the brochure from Rosina, but he hadn’t given the idea much thought. The political situation held no fear for him: as Allen Spicer had berated him, beyond having a vague sense that world relations were strained, he barely knew what the situation was. Still, it was odd to think of dragging himself back to the competition circuit in his fourth year as a professional, with all the toil it entailed. Greiner got nowhere with Van, and when Rosina called two days later, Van told her he was truly grateful for the thought but wasn’t interested.

“Oh Van, you must go!” she insisted. When she got no further, she wrote him a much longer letter in which she spelled out four excellent reasons for his taking part. First, he would have to work with great intensity, which would be good for him. Second, he would have to learn a great deal of new material. Third, he would meet the cream of the world’s young pianists. Fourth, she believed he would win.

Bill Judd called her.
“But you can’t
do
that, Rosina!” he cried. The whole thing looked ridiculous. The program was heavily weighted toward Russian music, the jury toward the Eastern Bloc. Everything in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was political, and clearly an American had no chance: Van would lose and look like an amateur. Besides, Judd would have to cancel the dates he had been busy lining up for Van in Europe. Rosina listened but refused to concede. Privately she must have known it was a long shot; Russia had changed incalculably since she left it a lifetime ago. On the other hand, Soviet Russians were still Russians, and if Van somehow pulled it off, it could be the boost his flagging career and confidence needed.

Van wrote back. He still didn’t think he would go, he said, but he would be in New York in early November, and they could discuss it then. Despite his reluctance, memories began to crowd in: memories of Christmas in Shreveport and the book with the pictures
of St. Basil’s Cathedral, of Rildia Bee’s stories about Rachmaninoff, and Rosina’s about the conservatory where Tchaikovsky taught and where she and Josef triumphed. There was also the curious fact, which Van was superstitious enough to heed, that a psychic he consulted in the spring revealed in a séance that within a year he would travel to
“an agrarian country” and win a gold medal.

In November he went to dinner at Rosina’s. As they leafed through the brochure, talked over the requirements, and sized up his chances, Van began to get agitated.
“The gold medal!” he exclaimed. Yet he was still far from convinced. A campaign got under way, in the course of which Sascha Greiner took him to lunch three times.
“Dear Van, I beg of you,
please
go,” he wheedled. Eugene Istomin, the pianist who had been on the Leventritt jury, took him to lunch at Reuben’s, a celebrity hangout on East Fifty-Eighth Street. They both seemed convinced that Van could win. Mark Schubart, the Juilliard dean, began looking for sponsorship; the brochure explained that Moscow would take care of accommodation, maintenance, and return transportation but not the outbound airfare. First Schubart tried the Music Committee of the president’s People-to-People Program, another Eisenhower initiative aimed at fostering international understanding. The committee referred the matter to the State Department and came back with the information that State favored American participation and would place no restrictions on travel but also would provide no funds.
Schubart wrote to Van informing him of the situation and then turned to the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music Program. Its administrator, the retired broadcaster César Saerchinger, indicated that the program was minded to offer a thousand dollars per contestant. Schubart was keen to avoid a repetition of the row that had roiled the music world when his boss, Bill Schuman, fought tooth and nail to send the Juilliard Orchestra to the upcoming Brussels World’s Fair with government funds Schuman had voted for as a member of the Music Panel. Rather than propose Juilliard alumni to the Rockefeller program, Schubart spoke with David Wodlinger
of the Institute of International Education and suggested that the IIE form a committee to choose the contestants itself.
He followed up with a letter recommending that there be no preliminary trials or publicity, since the only hope of being well represented “devolves on our being able to send to Moscow, not students, but young professionals, preferably with a good deal of concert experience. This caliber of young artist would undoubtedly not wish to participate in a competition to take part in a competition.” The IIE duly invited Schubart to be a member of the special committee, and on December 10 he called Bill Judd to tell him that Van had been nominated. Judd requested a
formal letter, presumably so he could get Van out of the commitments he had made on his behalf, and Schubart obliged. The only other contestant chosen was Juilliard violinist Joyce Flissler, who had toured South America with the backing of Schuman’s Music Panel. A few Americans who were already abroad, including Van’s former classmates Daniel Pollack and Jerome Lowenthal, sent word that they would enter under their own steam; otherwise, no one else was both
talented enough and willing to go.

Van, more in debt than ever, told Schubart he didn’t need the money.
“Take it,” Schubart insisted. “You’re crazy if you don’t.” Van was still wavering, but he decided to get ready just in case. There was a vast amount of music to prepare, and though he had already mastered some, a lot was new. The first round took in Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Liszt as well as Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky, but the second-round program consisted almost entirely of music by
Russian or Soviet composers, some barely known in the West. The finals, if he reached them, required a concerto by Tchaikovsky, a specially commissioned work by a Soviet composer that would be circulated two months prior to the competition, and another concerto of the contestant’s choice. There was never any doubt that Van would choose Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, but for the other concerto, he settled on perhaps the most demanding piano work of all: Rachmaninoff’s Orientally rich Third Piano Concerto. When Van
was fifteen he heard a recording of Rachmaninoff playing the piece, which was notorious for its technical challenges and struck fear into many pianists. Though Rildia Bee had given Van the music, and he had taken it everywhere with him, he had
bided his time learning it until 1954. Then, without telling Rosina, he finally began, first humming and singing his way through, as Mother had taught him. It was a daring and dangerous choice.

Rosina gave up her Sundays, which were usually reserved for rest and trips to the country.
“I won’t charge you now, but you can pay me back after you win in Moscow,” she half-joked. They worked together for
three, sometimes four or five hours.
“We have only three months in which to get ready,” she prodded him at the start. “You must live as though you really were in training. See nobody and go nowhere five days of the week and be in bed by eleven.” Remember the Russian proverb, she said,
“Without hard work you can’t even pull a fish out of the pond.” When he got going, his ambition flared up again, and he practiced as much as ten hours a day. Still, he refused to commit.

The application form carried the instruction that it must reach Moscow no later than December 31, and on the day Rosina left for California to spend Christmas with her children she convinced Van to send it off. He could always pull out later, she reasoned, but if he delayed any longer all their work would be wasted. The required information about his schooling, awards, and chosen program had already been typed in, but at the last minute he dithered over the music, crossed out three pieces, and wrote in three more. As instructed, he attached three nine-by-six-centimeter photographs, a certified copy of his Juilliard diploma, and a negative of his birth certificate, which came complete with tiny hand- and footprints. Then he rushed to the post office. Even by express mail, it was impossible to predict whether the package would get to Moscow on time during the holiday season, and he followed it with a telegram to Shostakovich:

HAVE JUST MAILED MY APPLICATION TONIGHT DECEMBER TWENTIETH HOPING IT REACHES YOU IN TIME.

A few days later Van headed out of town for his two scheduled community concerts in Ohio and Michigan. By the first he was feeling feverish, but he played both dates. The fever worsened as he flew back to New York, and when he stepped into a grocery store, he dropped to the floor in a faint. The doctor diagnosed a bad flu—in other reports, a
flare-up of colitis—and prescribed bed rest, though months of anxiety had undoubtedly contributed to his collapse.

Probably it would not have helped his recuperation to know that one foreign competitor had already arrived in Moscow and was working even more single-mindedly than he.

LIKE VAN
, Liu Shikun started learning the piano at age three, though he had even less choice in the matter. His businessman father, who had trained as a singer and was determined to see his son succeed as a classical musician, sat him on his knee and taught him, getting him to memorize each piece by singing it out. By six, Liu was performing Mozart concertos in his hometown of Tianjin, a treaty port near Beijing then under Japanese occupation, and at ten, the year the Communists won the Chinese Civil War, he took first prize in a national piano competition. Liu entered the conservatory and progressed so fast that he represented China at the prestigious Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest when he was seventeen. Politically savvy from growing up amid war and clashing ideologies, he was
convinced it was a fix when first prize went to a Soviet pianist named Lev Vlassenko and Liu placed third; that year, 1956, relations between China and the Soviet Bloc had dramatically soured when Mao angrily denounced Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and rebuked him for revisionism.