Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (24 page)

Van entered, and the roar seemed to swell the walls. The audience stamped their feet and yelled the now-familiar “Vanya! Vanyusha!” With a sheepish glance of gratitude, Van picked his way between the violas and cellos to the piano. Culture Minister Nikolai Mikhailov, seeing him for the first time, was surprised by both his height and his demeanor: the American was, he thought, “a
shy boy, somewhat angular, with a naïve, childishly touching expression on his face; precisely a boy, not a young man.”

The conductor rapped his baton ineffectively. With gentle hazel eyes set in a sensitive face and eloquent hands that clearly expressed his emotions, Kirill Kondrashin was a man of simple origins who was evangelical about bringing great art to the people. At the morning rehearsal he had bonded in a fatherly way with the young American, while Van had felt miraculously in tune with Kondrashin, as if he were born to play with a Russian conductor.

Van nodded, Kondrashin raised his stick, and the hall went quiet to hear what the Texas wonder boy would do with their Tchaikovsky First.

HE LEANED
back, eyes half shut, lips pursed to sing, and played to himself the scenes set in the Moscow of his imagination. As he plunged his hands fearlessly into the crashing opening octets, the sound ringing out full and rich as a Russian bell, he was
transported back centuries to the old Kremlin, with its Byzantine intrigue and pomp. The czar and czarina entered, followed by their boyars, and took their seats. With the dashing barbarity of the first theme, a grand ballet began. As the melodies weaved together, the mood was bittersweet, like
Anna Karenina.
The architecture was lucid, the rhythm propulsive, the tone massive but mellifluous, the nuances and shades of sound infinite. There was no affectation; like an actor breathing unsuspected color into a writer’s words, Van felt every movement of the music, bringing out each detail in dazzlingly sharp colors and blending it into the mounting emotional drama.

The ballet ended, and he was in the second movement, telling the simple story of a peasant women with her baby, his hands tenderly rising and staying suspended for long moments, seemingly weightless. In the middle, at the prestissimo section, he sketched a dream sequence, a fleeting memory of bygone youth. Then a hullabaloo: the baby has woken up. Van’s hands flew abruptly from one side to another, as if he were pushing away heaps of sounds that threatened to engulf him, but his face was a picture of absolute ease.

Now the last movement was reeling from his fingers: a drunken Russian folk dance, punctuated with explosive hiccups. Here, of all places, where Tchaikovsky had first played his concerto to a horrified Nikolai Rubinstein, Van could feel the sadness-in-happiness of the Russian heart. The tempo was unhurried, the tone lullingly songlike. Imperceptibly the drama intensified, until the gathering energy broke like a thunderstorm that fused together the flashes of scenes and images in one great curtain of sound, a triumphant, exulting climax of freedom and happiness and the glory of life.

A final furious dash up and down the keys, and applause thundered through the hall. Van bowed, repeatedly. Kondrashin bowed.
The orchestra stood up and bowed. The conductor left the stage, and when the buzz finally died down, Van played the tricky “Rondo” by Kabalevsky, who was sitting directly in front of him at the jury table. This time the audience jumped to its feet. The regulations required Van to remain seated and wait for Kondrashin to come back out for the second concerto, an arrangement that would never have stood under professional conditions. Yet, to Van’s embarrassment, he had broken a piano string during the “Rondo,” which his fans took as further proof of his terrific emotional intensity. He was given a five-minute break while the technician attended to the piano, allowing him to get a glass of water and the audience to murmur with bated breath.

When Kondrashin finally came out, the hall had reached an almost unbearable pitch of emotional tension. Only Van was serene. He felt that God’s blessing had descended on him, and he sat down to play
as he had never played in his life.

Gently he picked out the first muted notes of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in D Minor. To his mind, the liquid work was a
one-act opera in which the soloist took all the roles. His tempos were slow, his phrasing generous, and the piano merged with the orchestra to sing a nostalgic lament of remembrance and loss. The sweep was symphonic, but the tone was chastely confiding, as if the powerful swells and delicate shades and sudden avalanches and belligerently ardent lyricism were the inward drama of a searching soul. He heaved upward in electric surges toward the stormy first movement cadenza—and suddenly the audience let out its breath. For the first time in living memory Van was playing the “Ossia” cadenza, the big one that even Rachmaninoff had found too difficult and had substituted with a shorter, simpler passage that nearly every other pianist adopted. His huge hands hurtled into the hard-driving chords, the relentless outburst under complete command. The audience barely noticed the stunning technique: they were transfixed by the experience of watching a boy from Kilgore, Texas, play Russian music more like a Russian than their own musicians. If you’d closed your
eyes, though few did, you could have imagined yourself in a time before Stalin’s Terror, before Lenin himself, when, in this very building, Tchaikovsky composed and Rachmaninoff played music that echoed the greatness of the Russian soul. Where did an American get to divine the subtleties of their spirit, the inmost essence of their sacred, scarred culture? To a people so long cut off from the West, it was dizzying and devastatingly moving.

Already Van was playing the final movement, his long fingers climbing to a farseeing height of divine generosity, reaching still further for an expansive moment of transcendent calm, played out of time. Then the gradual descent to the coda, where the first theme returns, humbler and wiser, the cascading emotions crashing down in a single exhalation until it ended in a joyous surge of sound.

For a moment, as he bowed his head over the piano, there was absolute silence. Then, like a sea swell, the audience rose as one, as stamping and cheers echoed and reechoed. Next to Max Frankel an elderly Russian musician jumped to his feet.
“Just like Rachmaninoff!” he cried. “Just like Rachmaninoff!”

“Did I hear you right?” Frankel asked.

“Maybe even better,” the man exulted.

Van effusively thanked the orchestra and embraced Kondrashin with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, Russian-style, which drove his fans wilder. Ignoring the regulations, the jury stood up and applauded. Richter was crying. Neuhaus and Goldenweiser, who had always been at odds on every issue, hugged one another. Around the hall, groups of students set up a chant of “First prize!” It caught on, even though six of the nine finalists were still to play. Tearful women pushed to the front, proffering huge bouquets of roses. Van shyly took the flowers and slanted offstage to renewed sighs and screams.

The white-haired Goldenweiser, an old friend of Rachmaninoff’s, labored down the center aisle muttering,
“Genius! Genius!” The orchestra players were smiling and joking, tiredness forgotten in the knowledge that they were part of a red-letter day in Soviet music.

Gilels made his way backstage. He had always been careful to play
the consummate party loyalist, but now he walked straight up to Van and threw his arms round him. So did Kondrashin. The veteran English composer Sir Arthur Bliss bustled over:
“Oh my dear boy, you played wonderfully today,” he said with a sigh. “I admire your gift and I will go down on my knees in front of you, I would give you the biggest, highest prize possible, but, alas, I cannot do this.” They hugged each other, and both cried.

The applause showed no sign of letting up, and after a hasty consultation the judges agreed on a blatant violation of the rules. Gilels took the young American by the hand, led him out a second time, and kissed him in full view of the party bosses. As Van demurely bowed, a salvo of precious pictures, historic program notes, and old diamond jewelry flew toward him. Dazed, he picked his way through heaps of flowers. There were flowers inside the piano and flowers falling from the air. He caught some and pressed them to his heart. Finally, the orchestra abandoned all restraint, stood up, and joined in the celebration.

The clamor reached the ears of the crowds still pushing outside the conservatory. “Vanya! Vanya!” they shouted. “Kleeburn! Kleeburn!” the audience returned. Now they were clapping rhythmically in unison, a peculiarly Russian compliment.

Frankel looked around in disbelief. The standing ovation lasted eight and a half minutes. No one could remember anything like it in the ninety-two-year history of the Moscow Conservatory.

Finally, the stage was reset for the night’s second finalist, Eddik Miansarov. By the time he came on, a large part of the audience had walked out.

Outside, the police and military
cordons collapsed. Fans climbed up fire escapes and across roofs, and riots broke out as the authorities tried to restrain them. Van stayed safely inside, venturing out only at midnight, still surrounded by admiring friends. Teachers came up and told him they had believed only Russians could really feel Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
“We were mistaken,” they said, half in wonder and half in chagrin. Inside the doors, he glanced at the bill
board where posters advertising forthcoming concerts were pinned up. A large sheet announced a solo recital to be given by the winner of the piano competition the following Friday. Space had been left for the name, but
students had already written in “VAN CLIBURN” so many times that there was no room left. As always in the Soviet Union, there was a political message behind the mischief making. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who had managed to squeeze into the concert, was in no doubt that Van had to win. Yet he and his fellow students half-feared that the conservatory’s party functionaries might get a call from the Central Committee Secretariat and that it would all be
hushed up as if it had never happened.

Across the Soviet Union millions had gathered in front of television sets to watch the broadcast. Van was the first American most had seen live, and they were taken aback. In Leningrad, two
piano-mad schoolgirls named Elena and Natasha were mesmerized by his ardent, soulful performance and the way his whole body seemed fused to the music. In Egorievsk, in the Moscow region, tenth-grade student
Tanya Kryukova watched shaken and sobbing. She cried through the break in the performance and, afterward, sat down and wrote to Van, “Oh if only I had been in that hall that evening! If only I could get close to the stage, close to you, and join the mad applause to you, to your talent. Of course you wouldn’t even have noticed the seventeen-year-old girl, mad with happiness and admiration, but I could have kissed and kissed your hands, the wonderful hands of the wonderful musician . . . My dear, dear Van Cliburn, I cannot describe my admiration for you. I have no words to prove that I am in love with you as a pianist and a musician.” A
maid at a Moscow institution was equally transfixed. “You know,” she tremulously told a friend, “I always turn off the TV or switch channels when they start playing this kind of music, an orchestra or something. But this time there was a young lad playing, really just a boy, and I was sitting there in tears. I don’t know what happened to me, I never listened to this kind of music, but I couldn’t tear myself away. I could have sat there forever.” Van’s tender Romanticism had unlocked feelings pent up for decades by
the programmed pragmatism of Soviet life, and barely knowing why, countless Russian hearts reached out to him. That night, a young American less than a month into his first overseas trip was the most beloved individual in the Soviet Union.

No one, least of all the psychological operation experts, could have foreseen it, because it could have been no one else. Out of a bleak world of enmity and despair had come a tall, blond, blue-eyed Texan who loved Russia and its music with humble reverence. He had old-fashioned courtliness, a touchingly eager manner, and a spectacular way with the piano that transported them to a half-remembered past. Music that depicted the many cruelties and brutalities of that past was not for him: the Russia he summoned up with his hands was a place of magnificence, beauty, and romance. How could anyone not have fallen for him?

He had one more quality, which more than anything else transformed the Soviet people’s image of Americans: innocence. “He’s a
fourteen year old boy psychologically,” Sviatoslav Richter gloated to Heinrich Neuhaus, who was starting to say the same thing but was relieved his friend said it first. It was meant, mostly, as a compliment: an intuition that Van possessed the forthright sincerity and originality common to great artists—the instinctive approach to music that Anton Rubinstein summed up as following
“whatever your soul tells you.” At this heady moment, with all Russia turned on its ear, it really seemed it could take something that simple to change the world.

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“We Are in Orbit”