Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (66 page)

98
  
“ORB SPANS U.S. 7 TIMES A DAY”:
Ibid., October 6, 1957.

98
  
“What went wrong”:
Charles Van Doren, video clip in
The Sputnik Moment
.

98
  
“This is a weight”:
Ibid
.

98
  
“slag heap”:
Boyer,
By the Bomb’s Early Light
, 14.

98
  
“If Russia wins dominance”:
Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, video clip in
The Sputnik Moment
.

98
  
“In a masterpiece”:
NBC radio, audio recording in
The Sputnik Moment
.

99
  
“The time has clearly come”:
Robert A. Divine,
The Sputnik Challenge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvi.

100
  
“Our
sputniks
are circling the world”:
Nikita Khrushchev, video clip in
The Sputnik Moment.

100
  
growing crisis:
Many documents detailing the Eisenhower administration’s response to
Sputnik
are accessible online via the Eisenhower Library at https://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/sputnik.html.

100
  
“OH WHAT A FLOPNIK”:
Daily Herald
(London), December 7, 1957.

100
  
“KAPUTNIK,” “DUDNIK,”
and
“STAYPUTNIK”:
Respectively
Daily Express
,
Christian Science Monitor
, and
News Chronicle
. The
NYT
recounted some of the international coinages in a December 8, 1957, article entitled “Enoughnik of This.”

100
  
“In 1957’s twelve months”:
Time
, January 6, 1958. Altogether, Khrushchev would appear on the cover of
Time
nine times.

101
  
Van was despondent:
Mark Schubart says so in SH; in the same dispatch, Schuyler Chapin claims that Van’s career lull was deliberate policy on CAMI’s part.

102
  
“Wait and See”:
Graffman,
I Really Should Be Practicing
, 97.

102
  
“Ugh, I look so white”:
VCL
, 82.

103
  
crossed the street:
As told to Howard Aibel by Rosina Lhévinne and recounted to the author.

103
  
“Oh . . . The ocean”:
SH. The same dispatch quotes Schulyer Chapin’s account of Van’s near drowning; Chasins gives a similar account in
VCL
, 73–74.

104
  
Billy Graham’s Crusade:
For the revival meetings, see Curtis Mitchell,
God in the Garden: The Story of the Billy Graham New York Crusade
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957); and Uta Andrea Balbier, “Billy Graham’s Crusades in the 1950s: Neo-Evangelicalism Between Civil Religion, Media, and Consumerism,”
Bulletin of the GHI
44 (Spring 2009): 71–80.

104
  
“master-minded by Satan”:
Stephen J. Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War
(Balti-more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 81.

104
  
Jerome Lowenthal . . . met him:
Tim Madigan, “Van Cliburn: ‘The Texan Who Conquered Russia,’”
FWS-T
, February 27, 2013.

104
  
Doctors Hospital:
TM2.

105
  
draft board evaluation:
Ibid.

105
  
“He has won many awards”:
MMP, October 17, 1956, Folder 3, Box 2, WSP.

105
  
fear crept over him:
“I was at my lowest professional ebb,” Van wrote in an article entitled “What Is Success?” in
Guideposts Magazine
, February 1959. “I had run up some sizeable debts, which my parents knew nothing about. The danger then was not to let fear overwhelm me.”

105
  
Olegna Fuschi:
The story is captured in Rosina Lhévinne’s notes for an interview, Box 28, RPL. Rosina also records her instant reaction that Van was the only person she would encourage to go to Moscow, together with Van’s response and her campaign to persuade him. Further details are given in
VCL
, 92, and
VC
, 92.

105
  
Washington had vetoed it:
MMP, February 8, 1955, and January 17, 1956, Folders 2 and 3, Box 2, WSP.

105
  
Fuschi was turned down:
MMP, May 22, 1957, Folder 2, Box 2, WSP.

106
  
always reliable Emil Gilels:
Possibly Gilels was not as attuned to the Soviet regime as he appeared; see Norman Lebrecht, “The Secret Torments of Emil Gilels,” December 31, 2010, http://slippedisc.com/2010/12/the_secret_torments_of_emil_gi/.

106
  
“Van”:
VCL
, 92. The quotations in the following paragraph are from the same source.

107
  
“You must go, Van”:
VCG.

107
  
“Oh Van, you must go”:
Ibid.

107
  
“But you can’t
do
that, Rosina”:
VCL
, 95.

108
  
“an agrarian country”:
“American Sputnik.”

108
  
“The gold medal”:
Rosina Lhévinne notes for an interview, Box 28, RLP.

108
  
“Dear Van, I beg of you,
please
go”:
VCL
, 96.

108
  
Schubart wrote to Van:
Letter of November 13, 1957, Folder 5, Box 14, JAD.

109
  
He followed up with a letter:
Mark Schubart to David Wodlinger, November 15, 1957, Folder 5, Box 14, JAD.

109
  
formal letter:
Mark Schubart to William Judd, December 10, 1957, Folder 5, Box 14, JAD.

109
  
talented enough and willing to go:
Mark Schubart, in SH.

109
  
“Take it”:
VC
, 94.

109
  
Russian or Soviet composers:
For the semifinals, there was a choice of a prelude and fugue by Taneyev, Tchaikovsky-Catoire, Tchaikovsky, or Shostakovich; four pieces from a choice of sonatas by Russian or Soviet composers Alexandrov, Balakirev, Glazunov, Kabalevsky, Myaskovsky, Medtner, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Shostakovich, or Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition
; a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Sonata in G Major or C-sharp Minor; and a work by a contemporary composer, preferably from the candidate’s country.

110
  
bided his time . . . until 1954:
In the
Washington Times
of August 21, 1994, Van is quoted as saying, “I began learning it in 1953, when I was 17, unbeknownst to Mrs. Lhévinne.” But Van turned seventeen in July 1951. The same piece adds that he performed it for the first time “that summer with conductor Walter Hendl at the Chautauqua festival in New York.” Yet Van played the Tchaikovsky B-flat Minor Concerto with the Chautauqua Orchestra on August 9, 1953, and Rachmaninoff’s Third in summer 1954. Most likely he started working on the Rachmaninoff early in 1954, when he was nineteen, and performed it for the first time that summer, when he had just turned twenty.

110
  
“I won’t charge you now”:
Martin Canin, interview with the author. Rosina’s lodger and domestic helper, Fiorella Miotto, later married Canin, who was Rosina’s assistant from 1959 to 1976.

110
  
three, sometimes four or five hours:
Dowis, “Rosina: A Memoir,” 373.

110
  
“We have only three months”:
VCL
, 97.

110
  
“Without hard work”:
“‘Vanya’ Cliburn: Popular Does Not Mean Good,”
Argumenty I Fakty
39 (September, 2004). In the same interview, Van says that Rosina “forced” him to work nine to ten hours a day.

110
  
“HAVE JUST MAILED MY APPLICATION”:
This and the following cables and letters exchanged between Van and Shostakovich, together with Van’s application materials, are preserved in Fonds 214, no. 20, GM.

111
  
flare-up of colitis:
“All-American Virtuoso.”

111
  
convinced it was a fix:
My account of Liu Shikun’s story is largely based on my interviews with him, conducted March 12 and 14, 2015. Liu claims he was the audience favorite in Budapest from the start and that the organizing committee gave him a precious lock of Liszt’s hair from the Liszt museum by way of an apology. The political currents are hard to untangle: Hungary was of course on the brink of an anti-Soviet revolution.

112
  
all-union selection marathon:
The process is recounted in N. Mikhailov, “Report from the Ministry of Culture of the USSR on the Results of the Tchaikovsky International Piano and Violin Competition,” April 22, 1958,
CCCP&C
, 55.

112
  
Baku . . . Vilnius:
Betty Blair, “The Era of Van Cliburn,”
Azerbaijan International
(Fall 1995), http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/33_folder/33_arti cles/33_vancliburn.html.

113
  
Ashkenazy refused, too:
Vladimir Ashkenazy did not remember this episode when I interviewed him on September 3, 2014, but his refusal is recorded in Mikhailov’s report in
CCCP&C
. After Van’s sensational victory, some regretted their decision to cry off: violinist Eduard Grach entered the next competition in 1962, winning fifth prize.

113
  
Lev Vlassenko:
My account is drawn from my interview with Lev’s widow, Ella, conducted in Moscow on August 10, 2014, together with the collected reminiscences of Lev and others in
Lev Vlassenko: Articles, Reminiscences, Interviews
(Brisbane: Allstate Printing and Graphics, 2009), and
Lev Vlassenko: Grani lichnosti
(Moscow: Musyka, 2013).

113
  
“Iron Lev”:
Viktor Likht, “Shtarkman in the Memoirs of His Friends,”
Zametki po Evreiskoi Istorii
10 (October 2006), Internet publication.