Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (67 page)

113
  
Hungarian students:
Tamás Vásáry, interview with the author, June 13, 2014. In the heated political atmosphere, Vásáry, quite against his nature, was the ringleader.

115
  
“Oh, thank goodness . . . gelatin a day”:
VCL
, 98–99.

118
  
State Department summoned Mark Schubart:
VC
, 96–97.

118
  
“Look . . . see if he can help”:
VCL
, 100.

119
  
“Mrs. Leventritt . . . in my life”:
SH.

119
  
“I could tell”:
Sid Friedlander, “He Played the Piano and the World Was His,”
New York Post
, May 16, 1958.

119
  
“I’m going to win”:
Schuyler Chapin, quoted in SH.

120
  
“The Army can do anything”:
Abilene Reporter-News
, February 12, 1958.

7: TO RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

123
  
That was his first thought:
VCG; Alann Sampson, interview with the author, August 17, 2014. My account of Van’s experiences in Moscow draws on dozens of interviews he gave on the subject for the rest of his life, in both the United States and the USSR/Russia. Specific references are given for quotations and unique or noteworthy details, but no attempt has been made to annotate every instance of authorial discretion in choosing among minor discrepancies and variants. Particularly useful were Peter Rosen’s interview, cited as VCG; the reports of
Time
and the
NYT
; contemporary interviews in Soviet publications and press releases kept at the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin;
VCL
; and
VC.
The documents reprinted in
CCCP&C
on pp. 41–59 are invaluable for a view from inside the Soviet government.

124
  
subzero cold:
The weather conditions throughout Van’s visit are taken from
Vechernyaya Moskva
, which published a daily forecast.

124
  
Harriet Wingreen:
Interview with the author, May 13, 2014.

125
  
boxy apartment buildings:
Dubbed
Khrushchyovka
and then
Khrushcheby
(a pun on
trushcheby
, or “slums”), the apartment buildings saw their drearily uniform design become the subject of endless Soviet jokes. In one 1975 movie,
Ironiya sudby, ili S lyogkim parom!
(The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!), an inebriated Muscovite wakes up at the airport, takes a taxi to his address, lets himself in with his key, and finds himself in familiar surroundings—until he realizes he took the plane to Leningrad by mistake.

126
  
square of his childhood dreams:
“I feel as if I passed my childhood here, by the fantastic St. Basil’s Cathedral, on the cobbles of the pavement among the pigeons,” Van said in “Part of My Heart Is in Moscow,”
Moskva
11 (1962), 173.

127
  
“ARRIVED SAFELY EVERYTHING WONDERFUL”:
Quoted in a letter from Rildia Bee Cliburn to Rosina Lhévinne, March 26, 1958, Folder 19, Box 2, RLP.

127
  
competition papers:
Fonds 96m, Nos. 79–80; 81–82; 159–60; 177–78; GM.

127
  
nylon stocking:
“All-American Virtuoso.”

128
  
reports on him for the KGB:
This was simply taken for granted by everyone familiar with Soviet policy at the time. “In those days even the slightest detail was noted, and every word spoken by a guest was recorded,” recalls Sergei Khrushchev in
NKCS
, 323. The interpreters are mostly remembered as charming people.

128
  
KGB’s official Moscow hotel:
Victor Cherkashin and Gregory Feifer,
Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer
(New York: Basic, 2005), 46.

128
  
secret monitoring rooms:
Joy Neumeyer, “Poetry, Magic and Showgirls: The Story of Triumfalnaya Ploshchad,”
Moscow News
, April 22, 2013.

128
  
Hotel Ukraine:
Now the Radisson Royal. See Margarita Troitsina, “Secrets of Stalin’s Seven Moscow Skyscrapers,”
Pravda
, October 29, 2009.

128
  
concealed microphones:
Norman Shetler, interview with the author, December 12, 2015.

128
  
“Henya”:
Sergei Dorensky, interview with Lyuba Vinogradova, July 17, 2014. Then a graduate student and assistant teacher who had won first prizes at competitions in Warsaw and Brazil, Dorensky was later a leading professor of piano at the conservatory.

129
  
Daniel Pollack . . . the wrong pieces:
Pollack was studying at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna; the professor responsible for the error was Bruno Seidelhofer. For his experiences in Moscow, see
VC
, 103–4; “Piano Pathways: Daniel Pollack, 50 Years Later,” audio recording,
Weekend Edition
, NPR, Saturday, January 12, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18026453; “Daniel Pollack and the First International Tchaikovsky Competition,” USC Thornton press release, March 1, 2013, https://music.usc.edu/files/2013/06/Pollack_and_the_Tchaikovsky_ Competition.pdf; “Interview with Daniel Pollack,” bakitone.com/about/interview/daniel_pollack; “Interview with pianist Daniel Pollack,” http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-daniel-pollack-part-i; Jeff Kaliss, “Daniel Pollack: From Russia with Love,” https://www.sfcv.org/events-calendar/artist-spotlight/daniel-pollack-from-russia-with-love; Clifford J. Levy, “Piano Man, Winning Russian Hearts and Minds,”
NYT
, May 29, 2009.

129
  
Jerome Lowenthal:
Lowenthal, “Of Cortot, Kapell, Steuermann, and Preserving Musical Traditions,”
Clavier
41, no. 9 (November 2002); M. Uszler, “American Savoir-Faire: An Interview with Jerome Lowenthal,”
Piano and Keyboard
no. 192 (May/June 1998).

129
  
Norman Shetler:
Interview with the author. See also Moor, “Sviatoslav Richter: Sequestered Genius,” 49–51, 157–59. Shetler met Van in 1951 and enrolled in Juilliard to start in the fall of 1952, but he was drafted that summer and entered the army in October.

130
  
“Welcome to Moscow”:
VCL
, 103; “Cliburn Finds Russian Music Lovers Sincere and Gracious” (UP),
Galveston Daily News
, April 18, 1958.

130
  
competition in Lisbon:
The Vianna da Motta Competition, first organized in 1957 by Motta’s protégé Sequeira Costa, who was subsequently the youngest judge for the Tchaikovsky Competition.

130
  
queen of Belgium arrived:
See
The Queen Elisabeth of Belgium in the Soviet Union
, film dir. A. Rybakova, CSDF, 1958, net-film.ru/en/film-4919/;
Tchaikovsky Competition 1958
, youtube.com/watch?v=UeE4szjJQMk.

131
  
Thorunn Johannsdottir:
Interview with the author, September 3, 2014. She performed under the name Thorunn Tryggvason.

132
  
Soviet composer spread rumors:
Mikhailov, “Report from the Ministry of Culture,” in
CCCP&C
, 51–52. Mikhailov insists the claims were pure slander.

133
  
Twenty-five violinists:
The booklet of competitors’ biographies, which was evidently prepared sometime before the start of the competition, lists twenty-nine violinists (twenty-four men and five women) and fifty pianists (thirty-one men and nineteen women). The final figures of twenty-five and thirty-six are given in Culture Minister Mikhailov’s report in
CCCP&C
; the secretary of the jury confirms the number in S. Simonov, “On the International Piano Competition,”
SM
, April 21, 1958. Abram Chasins’s claim that forty-eight pianists took part suggests that the contestants themselves were unaware of the actual number.

133
  
three Americans:
Evidently they were expected until the last minute; the
NYT
reported on March 25, 1958, that eight American musicians were to compete in Moscow.

133
  
Six were excused:
In “On the International Piano Competition,” Simonov, the jury secretary, says thirty contestants took part in the preliminary stage. Pollack had won first prize in the little-known Guild Record Festival; Lowenthal had won second prize, behind Martha Argerich and jointly with Texas pianist Ivan Davis, in the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition held in Bolzano in 1957. (Jeaneane Dowis took third prize; the previous year, James Mathis had come third and Ivan Davis second; and in 1960, Mathis tried again and improved to second place.) Roger Boutry of France and Alexei Skavronsky of the Soviet Union were also excused during the first round.

133
  
twelve judges from the Soviet Bloc:
Seven were from the Soviet Union: Gilels, Richter, Neuhaus, Oborin, and Kabalevsky, together with the Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshinsky and the pianist Pavel Serebryakov, whom Olegna Fuschi had met in Brazil. Also from the Soviet Bloc were the Bulgarian composer Pancho Vladigerov, the Romanian conductor George Georgescu, and pianists František Maxián (Czechoslovakia), Lajos Hernádi (Hungary), and Henryk Sztompka (Poland). The five remaining judges were Bliss, the Brazilian composer Camargo Guarnieri, the Belgian conductor Fernand Quinet, the French pianist Armand de Gontaut-Biron, and the Portuguese pianist José Carlos de Sequeira Costa. The last two replaced three who withdrew after the competition materials had been printed—Joseph Marx (Austria), Carlo Zecchi (Italy), and Marguerite Long (France)—making the total seventeen rather than the intended eighteen.

134
  
French-kissing:
Norman Shetler, interview with the author.

134
  
“LOVE AND THOUGHTS”:
Van Cliburn telegram to Rosina Lhévinne, Folder 20, Box 2, RLP.

134
  
voice of Russia itself:
Van recalled the episode numerous times, most evocatively in “Nobody Dares Speak Badly of Russia in Front of Me,”
Trud
, September 18, 2009.

135
  
Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian:
TM1.

136
  
Smiles broke out:
For the impact of Van’s appearance, see E. Gobrynina, “New Meetings with Van Cliburn,”
Muzykalnaya Zhizn
13 (1962), 16–17. Van remembered his own reactions most clearly in “Winners of the Competition Speak,”
SM
, May 1958.

136
  
four études:
Chopin’s “Winter Wind,” op. 25, no. 11; Scriabin’s Op. 8 in D-sharp Minor; Rachmaninoff’s “Étude-Tableau” in E-flat Minor, op. 39; and Liszt’s “Mazeppa.”

137
  
tears glistened:
Arthur Shtilman, “In that memorable April: Fifty years ago—the triumph of Van Cliburn in Moscow,”
Jewish Heritage Almanac
2, no. 55 (March/April 2008), http://berkovich-zametki.com/2008/Starina/Nomer2/Shtilman1.htm.