Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (5 page)

Shostakovich was the celebrity witness to the glories of Soviet culture, but the luxury accommodation was no recompense for the humiliation he suffered. At the official press conference, he stood up, his face a
“bag of ticks and grimaces,” his eyes downcast behind thick wire-rimmed glasses, and read from a prepared statement, accusing Western
“hatemongers” of “preparing world opinion for the transition from cold war to outright war.” In the audience was the Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his first cousin Vladimir,
had fled the revolution and taken U.S. citizenship. Nabokov watched Shostakovich read in a shaky voice before breaking off a short way through, leaving a
“suave radio baritone” to finish his speech, and decided to expose the sham. Jumping to his feet, Nabokov loudly asked if the composer supported the recent Soviet vilification of his great compatriot Igor Stravinsky. Shostakovich worshipped Stravinsky as a composer, if not always as a man, but he was forced to parrot the official line. To Nabokov, this was proof enough that Shostakovich was
“not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government.”

Later that year, in his oratorio
The Song of the Forests
, Shostakovich extolled Stalin as the “great gardener,” and rehabilitated himself a second time. Nabokov, meanwhile, became secretary-general of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA client organization that covertly funded moderate left-wing European intellectuals as an antidote to far-left-wing European intellectuals who claimed that culture and communism were better bedfellows than culture and liberal democracy. Music featured heavily among its many projects, including a festival staged in Paris called Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, which was designed to pick up the baton of modernism the Soviets had dropped. Heading the program was
The Rite of Spring
, with its composer, Stravinsky, whom Nabokov had sought out in Los Angeles, prominently in attendance.

Music was no longer a bond between East and West; on the contrary, both sides manipulated it to point up their differences. The cultural chasm widened as the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device in August 1949, as China fell to Mao Zedong’s Communists weeks later, and as U.S. forces went back into action in Korea the following summer. America fell prey to a hysterical Red Scare, fanned by Senator Joe McCarthy, which sought to expose Communists and fellow travelers in every area of public life,
including classical music. In this toxic atmosphere, anything Russian was beyond the pale. One producer at the Voice of America, the nation’s external broadcaster, asked the music library for a recording of a popular piece called “Song of India” and found that the Red baiters had banned it.
“It’s by
Rimsky-Korsakov,” the librarian explained, “and we’re not supposed to use anything by Russians.”

For the crew-cut American pianists who came of age in the 1950s, the steely tones and coiled rhythms of modern music were all the rage. Germanic composers were also firmly back in favor: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were the undisputed masters. As for Russian music and the whole Romantic repertoire, with its cult of the inspired virtuoso (including the Hungarian Liszt and the Polish Chopin), it was suddenly as out of fashion as powdered wigs and pistols at dawn. To a mop-haired seventeen-year-old who arrived in New York in the fall of 1951, this came as an awful shock.

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Room 412

A TALL
pile of loud clothes was flapping along the hallway of the Juilliard School toward the elevator where the legendary Rosina Lhévinne was standing. Barely inhabiting the colorful threads was a rawboned creature with enormous waving hands, a snub nose, and a frizz of gingery blond curls that bounced nearly up to the ceiling. The kid was six foot four, maybe six foot seven with the hair. Rosina, who stood five foot two, craned her neck to find a spotty, boyish face beaming down at her with intent.

“Honey,” Van Cliburn announced, “ah’ve come to study with y’all.”

Joe, the school’s Irish elevator operator, might well have spluttered, for this was not the way to address New York’s most revered piano teacher. At seventy-one, the Russian-born Madame Lhévinne was loved and feared in equal measure. One observer suggested she combined the autocracy of
Catherine the Great with the coarseness of a droshky driver. If you could get through your pieces in room 412 at Juilliard, it was said, you could play anywhere in the world.

Rosina scanned the speaker’s face. She had not seen him before, but the voice was familiar: a honey-and-mesquite drawl that was at once grave and impish.
He had telephoned her the other day from the Buckingham Hotel, where he was staying with his mother.
During three summers, the pair had traveled up from Texas and enrolled Van in school in order to find the right teacher, and Rildia Bee had then
written the school with their final choice: Rosina Lhévinne. Now they had received the school registration card only to find Van had been assigned to another teacher’s class. They felt hurt, bewildered, and betrayed.

Rosina explained that her classes, which were always oversubscribed, were unfortunately full. She had not heard Van play at the auditions, and he would have to make do with one of her assistants. “Perhaps,” she had offered over the telephone, “I can take you next year.”

“But I must study with you, Mrs. Lhévinne,” the voice had come back, its unrushed tones curling round every word. “Even if you can give me only ten minutes a week, I’ll consider myself your pupil. However”—and here the voice lingered with a warning edge—“if you definitely can’t take me and I go to another teacher, I’ll stay with that teacher until I graduate. What I want you to know about me, Mrs. Lhévinne, is that I’m very loyal.”

“Shhh,” Rildia Bee had whispered from the other room of the little suite. As usual, Harvey had stayed back home in Texas.

“No, Mother,” Van had said firmly when he put the phone down. “She’s a very nice lady, but I want her to know—when I begin, I stay and I end.”

As luck would have it, Rosina already had two students from Texas. Jeaneane Dowis, a pretty, preppy, quick-witted brunette from Grapevine, was eighteen but had been at Juilliard for two years already. Her friend James Mathis, from Dallas, also eighteen, had just joined the Lhévinne class. Together they put in a word for Van: at the very least, they said, Madame should hear him play.

JUILLIARD OCCUPIED
a sandwich of limestone buildings at West 122nd Street, between Claremont Avenue and Broadway, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. One slice was the handsome Edwardian mansion of the old Institute of Musical Arts; the other, in streamlined Art Deco by the Empire State Building architects, was added when the institute merged with the
school founded, after much skullduggery, with the fortune of textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard. Six hundred artistic souls crammed into a tangle of pastel green corridors and stairways and halls, each confidently expecting a dazzling solo career and almost all destined to be brutally disappointed. Pianists, numbering two hundred or so, were the dominant tribe; there were also violinists, cellists, wind and brass players, percussionists, singers, composers, conductors, and, this year, dancers, whom the musicians noticed chiefly on account of their odor. Like monks in a cell, the musical novices shut themselves in rehearsal studios for ten hours a day, banding together to keep rivals away and scaring off freshmen with tall tales of razor blades planted between piano keys. Social life was intense but strained. United by a cultish devotion to the school and their art, students were jealously divided by the pressure to outplay one another to obtain a hearing. Some crumpled under the competition; others basked in a glow of conscious exclusivity, buoyed with the pleasant sensation of filling their space well.

As for the faculty, they were the students a few decades on. Teachers’ reputations depended on their attracting talented pupils, and they competed shamelessly for the best. Once they had them, they hated seeing them play for colleagues or talk to members of another class. Hierarchy was engraved in brass on the doors of their studios, recording how long they had survived. Rosina Lhévinne’s nameplate bore the year 1924, when she and her husband, Josef, joined the faculty. Both had graduated with
gold medals from the Moscow Conservatory in the 1890s, but after being trapped in Germany by the First World War and losing their savings in the Russian Revolution, they had sailed for America, where Josef made a sensational debut at Carnegie Hall and they taught in tandem, she bearing the brunt of the work while he was away performing and philandering. When Josef passed away in 1944, a year after his classmate and friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rosina became America’s foremost link to the golden age of Russian Romanticism. At seventy-one, she was Juilliard’s undisputed star teacher.

More perhaps than any other young American, Van revered that tradition, with its virtuosos who painted stories from the keyboard with a religious passion. To his mind, Romantic Russian music was so exquisitely, painfully beautiful that he knew it could only be the breath of God. Aside from Rildia Bee, he could not imagine studying with anyone else but Rosina, which was why he was here in the famous fourth-floor studio with its double walls and cork floor, ready to play his way into her hard-won affections.

Rosina sat in her high-backed green-upholstered chair as Van raised his huge, bony hands. They were as big as Josef’s, she noticed, big enough to play a twelfth and stretch thirteen notes, middle C to A, with long, tapered fingers that could get between the keys. But what were they doing? His left hand was drumming the opening fanfare of Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, a storm-racked chandelier of crashing chords that serious pianists were supposed to spurn. A deep, ominous tremolando, the same fanfare with the right hand, and another tremulous roll. Then the lightest chords, tripping off the fingers of his right hand while his left played the wistful melody. Both hands away, flying along the keyboard like a ballerina’s feet barely brushing the floor. A moment of tranquillity, his head back now, eyes closed, forehead creased at the exquisite beauty of the thing, his soul swelling with every note. Long before then, Rosina had her answer. The unusual boy was not only playing with startling control and power, but he was also constructing something uncommonly noble, sensitive, and heartfelt. More than that, he had a big, sweeping approach that she had not seen in years: a grand style that uncannily echoed the dashing virtuosos of her youth.

His playing thrilled a deep Russian chord in her. She found space in her class.

DURING THE
Great Depression many of Morningside Heights’ apartment buildings degenerated into single-room-occupancy hotels of such squalor that they scared off even students. Neighboring Columbia University had recently begun a program of crash gentrification
by buying up whole blocks and returning them to family housing, and 15 Claremont Avenue, a handsome ten-story structure three blocks from Juilliard, was one of the beneficiaries. The
five-room apartment leased by Mr. and Mrs. Allen Spicer was generously sized, the room for rent had its own bath, and best of all, there was an ornate Chickering grand in the living room.

Bristle-haired Allen Spicer worked in the traffic department of the New York Telephone Company. His chubby, white-haired wife, Hazel, was secretary to the principal of a Bronx high school. They needed the extra income, but Mrs. Spicer was reluctant to take responsibility for a roomer as young as Van. Rildia Bee charmingly waved away her doubts and asked if her son might be allowed to practice on the piano for an hour or two a day. Mrs. Spicer reluctantly agreed, so long as she didn’t have to listen to scales. Van moved in, and Rildia Bee left her only child for the first time.

He loved his parents deeply, but in many ways the move was a relief. His Texas adolescence, he once admitted, had been a living hell:
“You can’t love music enough to want to play it without other kids thinking you’re queer or something.” In his early teens he shot up to his full height, his shoe size nearly matching his years, and his hair kinked into an uncontrollable frizz. When unisex salons were widely regarded as abominations and the epithet
longhair
, signifying an artist or intellectual, was akin to
sissy
, he had been easy pickings for school jocks. As well as retreating still further into music, he had unburdened his awkwardness into old-fashioned poems: one, published in the
National Anthology of High School Poetry
in 1950, was bleakly titled “The Void.” Though he was no genius at academic work—his IQ was measured at
a high but unspectacular 119—he had sweated through summer sessions in the dusty brick groves of Kilgore College to graduate high school at sixteen, twelfth in a class of 103, with the highest ratings for personality, attitude, attendance, associates, chance of success, and character, though only a “satisfactory” for leadership, and ready to get out of town as fast as he could.