Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (4 page)

WHEN VAN
was ten, Harvey reached a decision.
“Well, all right then, young fella,” he said, “if that’s the way it’s gonna be, we’ll just git
with it. There’s not gonna be any halfway best around here. If you’re gonna be a concert pianist you’re gonna be the best there is.” He built a music room on the garage so Van could practice whenever he liked. Now he was at the piano three hours a day, four if schoolwork allowed, and eventually as much as five. Sometimes he rebelled, but Rildia Bee was not above moral blackmail. On one day that he cried off practice, Harvey badly wanted to see a movie.
“It hurts me
terribly
,” Rildia Bee told Van, “but we have to show we have strength. No we are
not
going, no matter what he says.” Van went to the piano, abjectly telling himself what a bad boy he was, and conquered a passage that had troubled him. “Thank you, Mother, thank you, Daddy,” he said afterward. “I know you were only trying to help me.” Rildia Bee left the room, but not before he saw her tear up. If he was really naughty, the ultimate sanction was to ban the NBC Blue Network Saturday broadcast from the Met. He had adored opera since he was four and had sat motionless through a dress rehearsal and three performances of
Carmen.
He wanted to be a bass baritone, playing the glamorous toreador Escamillo or the tyrannous police chief Scarpia or the tormented czar Boris Godunov, but when his voice broke at puberty, he was left with an indifferent baritone at best.

Operas were for special occasions, but concerts were part of the plan. Sometimes he felt as if he were growing up on Highway 80, where the forests gave way to sparser trees and open plains, rushing up to Dallas or anywhere a big-name performer was playing, pulling over to stanch one of his
nosebleeds with the kit they always had at hand, sleeping on the backseat during the drive home. The hum of tires on tarmac relaxed him, and on the cusp of his teens, he announced that he wanted to be a
taxi driver. Mother was not amused, which was perhaps the point.

He was never a regular kid, and he knew it. When he entered Kilgore Junior High he was already growing like a beanstalk in a wet spring, and basketball coach Q. L. Bradford made a beeline for him. Rildia Bee graciously steered the coach away: she appreciated his interest, she said, but it was impossible; her son’s fingers were
insured for a million dollars and were made for playing the piano, not shooting or dribbling a ball. The school band director had a friendlier reception when he dropped by: Van got himself a uniform, learned how to play the clarinet, and marched up and down tootling away, safely on the sidelines, when the Bulldogs played football. But when he moved to high school, Rildia Bee quickly buttonholed his physical education instructor,
Bob Waters, who spoke to the principal, C. L. Newsome, who excused Van from classes. One day, when he was playing ball in the street with some friends, he jammed his finger, and she restricted that kind of play, too. He was not bothered enough about sports to care, but when he won the leading role of
Mr. Belvedere, an elderly babysitter with a mysterious past, in the class play
Sitting Pretty
, he was desperate to take it and forlorn when Rildia Bee decreed that the rehearsals would encroach too much on his practice time. As a small protest, he became president of the
Thespian Club and the Spanish Club, and a member of the Student Council.

His school friends liked his quick laugh and antsy friendliness and wicked impressions, but he had precious little time to hang out with them. He had a desperate crush on a pretty young Latin teacher named
Winifred Hamilton and moped with another boy who shared it, but the few girls he managed to date were all Rildia Bee’s students. In his heart, though, he sensed that Mother knew best
.
She taught him to work hard enough to make it look easy when he played in public. She trained him to make a percussion instrument sing like a lyric instrument. She told him not to play faster than he could appreciate the music, that playing more slowly with greater rhythmic precision sounded faster than letting the notes tumble over one another. Music was a serious business, she lectured: “It stimulates both sides of the brain and enlivens the soul.” That dictum and her others were wired into his brain: “Sing it before you play it.” “You must find a singing sound.” “Listen for the eye of the sound.” “The first instrument was the human voice.” Once, she took Van to audition for the famous Spanish pianist and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star José Iturbi.
“You already
have the best teacher,” Iturbi told him. “You see, Mother?” Van said impatiently, and refused to hear of studying under anyone else.

It was always Mother, and Daddy of course, who was away a lot—
“Sonny Boy,” he’d say as he left in search of fairly priced crude, “now, you take care of your mother”—but who knew his son better than many fathers in an emotionally glacial age. If a friend had dared warn about the risks of raising a prodigy—for there were plenty of examples of infant marvels who startled grown-ups with their dazzling finger work only to lead lives misshapen by their devouring talent—Van would have understood least of all. He loved the company of adults, their attention and their stories of past times. By age eight, he had read his first book about English antique silver (in which his aunt was an expert) and learned all the markings by heart. He was born old, he said while still young. The past was the most beautiful place to be, and music was his time machine.

AS WORLD
War II ended, Van’s yearning to visit Russia faded like an old photograph, leaving only a nostalgic dream. But he had Russia’s music at his fingertips, and that was nearly as good. Rildia Bee enjoyed reminding him that he was getting the teaching of the great masters, Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, thirdhand; she had had it secondhand, she brightly added. Deep in East Texas she kept the Romantic flame burning pure and true, untainted by modern influences, and passed the torch on to her son. He had the demonstrative nature, the physical equipment, and a natural nobility of expression that perfectly suited the grandly expressive Russian style.

Van’s first big chance to show it off came when he was twelve and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 appeared on the list of pieces eligible for the annual Texas State Music Contest sponsored by Texas Gulf Sulphur Company. He memorized it in twenty-one days, Rildia Bee crossing each day off on the blackboard, and won the
two-hundred-dollar prize. Then he played it
with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, a plump pink boy with wavy ginger hair in a tweed suit
and wide-collared shirt grinning behind the piano and sounding as if he’d been born a hundred years before. At the end, the orchestra as well as the audience jumped to its feet. It was as if the fresh-faced kid had mysteriously channeled the soul of Tchaikovsky, the most Russian composer of them all.

Perhaps it was just as well that Van was unable to visit Tchaikovsky’s homeland, because it bore little similiarity to the country of his dreams. Barely two years after the end of the war, a Cold War was setting in between the Soviet Union and its former allies. Behind the Kremlin walls that so appealed to Van’s childish imagination, Joseph Stalin was driving his scientists to replicate the atomic bombs that America had exploded above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the dictator sought security by toying with the fates of neighboring nations, an Iron Curtain fell across Europe, and the shadow of totalitarianism and police government settled on its eastern half. In the Soviet Union, too, the relative freedoms of war retreated before a new campaign of fear. Once more, black secret police vans mockingly painted with advertisements for scarce meat and scarcer Soviet champagne roamed the streets, and routine torture, forced confessions, sham trials, mass deportations, summary executions, and arranged accidents began all over again.

To scour away the effects of exposure to the West during the wartime alliance, Stalin launched a campaign to expunge foreign influence from Soviet society—especially that of America, which was denounced from loudspeakers strung along streets as
“the warmonger and imperialist oppressor.” The arts were not immune, and of all Soviet arts, classical music was first.

High art had survived the Russian Revolution thanks to the leading role of the intelligentsia, who had simply declared the arts socialized. Lenin had envisioned concert halls packed with workers absorbing the improving strains of the classics. Stalin, a fanatical consumer of culture who attended Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
thirty times, saw music as a useful tool of ideology. In 1936 the dictator had lured Sergei Prokofiev back to Russia after nearly two decades’ exile in America
and Europe. Now he turned on him and Dmitri Shostakovich, Prokofiev’s rival for the title of greatest Soviet composer. In February 1948 the
Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution that attacked both men, together with other leading composers, for exhibiting bourgeois tendencies. In Soviet speak, a lexicon in which words acquired the opposite of their usual meaning,
bourgeois
signified avant-garde styles of Western origin. Allied to it was
formalism
, connoting a work of uninhibited creativity. Such “degenerate music” was rejected as difficult and therefore useless for developing proletarian culture; in its place was prescribed
socialist realism
, which was not intended to portray life as it actually was but rather as it would be in the ideal workers’ paradise. In practice, this amounted to bad imitations of Tchaikovsky’s stodgier successors, seasoned with hummable melodies and rousing heroic themes, but since composers were paid and given privileges by the state, so long as they obeyed party precepts their livelihood needed have no correlation with their talent. That much was clear when speakers at the ensuing First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers dismissed Comrade Prokofiev’s music as
“grunting and scraping,” ridiculed Comrade Shostakovich’s oeuvre as a
“muddled, nerve-wracking” hubbub exhibiting a neurotic and repulsive pathology, and labeled both men
“enemies of Russian music.” In Stalinist Russia, this was an attack on not just their careers but potentially their lives. Prokofiev found many of his works banned and the rest suppressed for fear of official displeasure; heavily in debt, he secluded himself to conserve his energy for composing. His estranged Spanish wife, Lina, was arrested on a charge of espionage and hauled off to the Lubyanka, the yellow neoclassical prison at the core of the Soviet police state. After nine months of torture she was sentenced to twenty years in the Gulag, the notorious chain of forced labor camps scattered across Soviet territory, on the basis of an extracted confession that was, anyway, a bureaucratic formality: in those days, there was a specific category for spouses and children of the condemned, “Traitor of Motherland Family Member.”

As for Shostakovich, he had been here before, in 1936, when he was
denounced and ostracized so severely that for months his life hung in the balance. He embraced the new attacks with abject humility.
“Once again,” he wrote in an open letter, “I moved in the direction of formalism and have begun to speak a language the people do not understand . . . I know that the Party is right. I am deeply grateful for the criticism.” Even so, his music was boycotted, his family’s privileges were rescinded, and he was fired from his job at the conservatory, where composers scrambled to accuse one another of formalism in hopes of deflecting the charge from their own work. Reserved and testy, alternately apologetic and irritable, Shostakovich busied himself with synchronizing the clocks in his apartment, cleaning obsessively, and checking the performance of the postal service by mailing himself cards.

In a system where one man’s word was law, fortunes could change with dizzying speed, and in 1949 Stalin decided he needed Shostakovich as a delegate to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace being held in New York that March. The meeting was among the most daring and successful creations of the Cominform (short for Communist Information Bureau), which Stalin had set up two years earlier as a lavishly funded vehicle for coordinating international political warfare. As the Congress filled the Art Deco halls of the Waldorf-Astoria, American liberals, including composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, spoke in favor of peaceful cooperation, while other liberals mounted a picket outside, one brandishing a placard reading “Shostakovich!
Jump thru the window!” in reference to a recent defection from the Soviet consulate.