Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (18 page)

A gaunt six foot two with a crew cut and thick glasses, Liu was still four months shy of his nineteenth birthday when the Chinese Ministry of Culture entered him for the Tchaikovsky Competition. Artistic accomplishment fitted with a Maoist slogan, “Both Red and talented,” and this time the ministry was taking no chances. As a backup, it selected pianist Gu Shengying, the delicate daughter of an entrepreneur
who was in jail after being convicted of espionage during Mao’s campaign against counterrevolutionaries, and in November it sent both pianists to Moscow to prepare. Liu was assigned to Samuel Feinberg, a veteran teacher and joint head of the Moscow Conservatory’s piano department, who was alarmed to discover that Liu knew virtually none of the required literature.

The Chinese pianist had been given a large room at the Central Hotel, with a grand piano, thick walls, and the usual double windows to keep out the extreme cold. Eating out was a waste of time, so he bought bags of bread, butter, sausages, and cheese, silently thanking his old family cook for accustoming his stomach to Western food, and stashed them in the gap between the windows. He raided his supplies when he was hungry, drank water from the tap, and practiced eleven or twelve hours at a stretch. For four months he kept up the same routine, seeing nothing of Moscow except the route between the hotel and the conservatory, a dozen minutes’ walk away.

When he was a boy, his father beat him when he ran away from the piano, and all his life he had hated practice. Yet he had no choice. The authorities back home were watching, and he knew the competition would be fierce; especially when the name of Lev Vlassenko, his bête noir from Budapest, was suddenly announced among the entrants.

THE TCHAIKOVSKY
Competition was fast approaching, and the Soviet Ministry of Culture was in a quandary. It was proving bafflingly hard to find qualified native pianists who were willing to take part.

Soviet musicians had a stellar track record in competitions, in part because a central board strictly vetted all entrants. For this first international competition on home ground, the process was writ large. An
all-union selection marathon had evaluated seventy musicians from conservatories in
Baku, Erevan, Gorky, Kiev, Kishinev, Leningrad, Lvov, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Odessa, Riga, and Vilnius, putting them through preliminaries, semifinals, and finals in a dry run of the main event. Nine violinists and nine pianists were selected to go forward;
all but one from the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories, which caused the authorities a good deal of soul-searching about the state of regional teaching. Yet the ministry was far from convinced that a surefire winner had been found. The problem seemed to be that the Soviets’ very dominance of the field had bred a kind of competition fatigue. Several international prizewinners in their late twenties with flourishing careers—among them violinists Igor Bezrodny, Rafael Sobolevsky, and Eduard Grach; and pianists Yevgeny Malinin, Dmitri Bashkirov, and Lazar Berman—had flatly refused to put in the necessary months of preparation. The bureaucrats approached Vladimir Ashkenazy, who was just twenty but who two years before had won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium, narrowly beating Van’s old classmate John Browning.
Ashkenazy refused, too, so they turned to
Lev Vlassenko.

Solidly built like a football coach’s dream tackle, with an erect bearing, beetling brows, and a Beethovian head of hair, at twenty-nine Vlassenko was only just within the upper age limit. A fitness fanatic who was often found standing on his head and who thought nothing of swimming the freezing Moscow River, he was known among the conservatory crowd, not always admiringly, as
“Iron Lev.” He was already an assistant professor at the conservatory and had little to gain from putting himself through another competition, especially when he still had raw memories of the rancor in Budapest, where a cabal of
Hungarian students started whistling every time a Soviet competitor came onstage. Besides, he had never played the Tchaikovsky concerto and had no particular desire to do so now. Still, the authorities kept insisting, and though Vlassenko was no party stooge, he was cautious by nature and caved in.

By then it was January, and time was short. For bureaucratic reasons, he and his wife, Ella, both of whom came from Tbilisi, Georgia, were ineligible to be registered in Moscow, so they lived beyond the northern city limits, in one half of a bright green dacha bought by Lev’s parents. Water came from a well in the garden, near the outdoor toilet; heat from a stove that an old woman helped them light. It
was a big step up from his first two years at the conservatory, when he rented a corner of a room and slept on a chair, but it still had no piano. Each morning, he woke in the early hours and set off for the conservatory, where even in midwinter he arrived at 7:00 a.m. as it opened and practiced until lessons began. This winter the snow was especially high, which made it challenging to get in at all, but luckily the authorities made special arrangements for the important event. The Soviet contestants were bused first to the Composers’ Union House of Creativity at Ruza, a peaceful compound of little dachas a couple of hours from Moscow, where Vlassenko spent two weeks learning the Tchaikovsky concerto, and then to Malakhovka, an area of historic dachas nearer the city, where Chekhov and Gorky once lived. The garage at the Malakhova resort home was turned into a rehearsal room, and two grand pianos, one a Steinway, were brought in. Day after day, Vlassenko played through the repertoire like Stakhanov at a coal seam, more or less up to tempo, intent on not missing a single note, concentrating so closely that he was spent after an hour. With his old teacher, the renowned Jacob Flier, there to support him, his confidence surged, which was just as well, because Iron Lev had a fatal and unpredictable flaw. Sometimes before a performance he was so nervous that he tensed up and played with sharp accents and exaggerated fortes or suffered memory lapses, and it scarcely helped when it was made clear that nothing less than the prestige of the Soviet state and of socialism itself rested on his shoulders.

Vlassenko was a voracious learner, and many evenings in Moscow he took courses at the Institute of Languages. Thanks to those classes, he could read English fluently, and shortly before the start of the competition he came across some laudatory articles about Van Cliburn. He was surprised. The lengthy official press releases had drawn attention to Roger Boutry and Annie Marchand of France and to Juilliard’s Daniel Pollack and Jerome Lowenthal as exemplars of the foreign talent about to arrive, but there had been no mention of a Van Cliburn. When he took the articles to the Organizing Committee, he was told they were American hype and meant nothing.
He wasn’t so sure. Alone among the Soviet contestants and jury, he suspected that a challenge lay in store.

The whole Soviet Union was abuzz with news of the Tchaikovsky Competition. The names of Shostakovich, Gilels, and Richter were everywhere. A national audience tuned in to a radio series called
Heading Toward the Competition
, which spotlighted the participants and their recordings, explained how the event would work, and interviewed leading Soviet musicians, who shared their hopes for its success.
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
devoted columns of print to the great event, running biographies of the contestants alongside their photographs: fifteen one day, fifteen the next. Muscovites reading the papers on street corners parsed the profiles for political meaning. The Soviet entrants typically made a play for sympathy by stressing that they came from a large family in a poor area such as Dagestan, while an Australian violinist attracted the wrong kind of attention by boasting that he was bringing a Stradivarius with him. All the foreigners volunteered that they were delighted to be coming to the Soviet Union, loved the country, and were enraptured by Tchaikovsky’s music. To readers used to attacks on imperialist aggression, this was intriguing: not so much that many Westerners were yearning to visit, but that the regime had decided to make them say so.

BY THE
time Rosina returned to New York in mid-January, Van was getting up from his bout of flu.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re back!” he cried when she called. “I must come right up and see you. Wait’ll I tell you what happened to
me
!” Minutes later he showed up at her door paler and skinnier than ever, shrugged off his overcoat with its permanently missing buttons, and sank into a chair. Three precious weeks had been lost to his illness, but a wonderful doctor had put him on a regimen of “vitamins, shots, raw eggs, and six envelopes of Knox gelatin a day.” The doctor conditioned Olympic athletes, and he had cut Van a deal: no win, no pay. The patient was feeling better already.

Rosina tried the gelatin and felt energized. Van resumed his daily practice and Sunday sessions, sometimes going into Juilliard to play. Before long, a cable from Moscow announced that sheet music for the special composition for the finals, “Rondo” by Dmitri Kabalevsky, would be sent “par avion your address.” It was signed “Shostakovich,” and on February 5 a letter arrived from Shostakovich. “Dear Mr. Van Kleeburn!” it began; presumably someone had translated his name into Russian, and someone else had translated it back again. The letter confirmed Van’s place in the piano competition, gave details of the dates and how to get a visa, and asked for a brief biography and an itinerary so he could be met at the airport. The “Rondo” sheet music was enclosed. The letter was dated January 18 and had taken two and a half weeks to arrive; with time wanting, Van immediately sat down and learned the piece in a few days. On February 12 he replied as requested, to acknowledge receipt of the music; meantime, he had begun agonizing again over his choice of pieces, and he dragged Shostakovich into the dilemma:

A question has been posed as to whether La Campanella of Liszt is considered an Etude. Or would you prefer one of the Transcendental Studies? Also, would it be possible for me to include—or substitute, as the case may be—on the second preliminary program, the F Minor Fantaisie of Chopin and the Liszt Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, in place of the Chopin B Minor Sonata. Or might I use all three of these compositions? Of course, I still will be using the Beethoven Op. 57 and the Brahms-Handel Variations.

After congratulating the composer on the great success of his Eleventh Symphony in Leningrad, which he explained he had read about in the magazine
USSR
, Van expressed his eagerness to meet him and the rest of the Organizing Committee.

A little flurry of cables followed:

POSSIBLE USE “CAMPANELLA,” LISZT TWELFTH HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY AND CHOPIN F MINOR FANTAISIE IN PLACE OF CHOPIN B MINOR SONATA ARE INCLUDED ON YOUR SECOND PRELIMINARY PROGRAM. REGARDS,

COMITÉ D’ORGANISATION

CHOSTAKOVITCH

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR CABLE WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR CONFIRMING AGAIN TO AVOID ERROR THAT ACCEPTABLE TO PRESENT BEETHOVEN APPASIONATE SONATA PROKOFIEF SONATA 6 FANTAISIE F MINOR AND LISZT 12 HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY AS PART B OF SECOND PRELIMINARY WARMEST GREETINGS = VAN CLIBURN

COMITÉ D’ORGANISATION CONCOURS TCHAIKOVSKY ACCEPTE VOTRE DERNIER PROGRAMME ET PRIE AVERTIR DATE ET ITINÉRAIRE VOTRE ARRIVÉE MOSCOU

RESPECTS

CHOSTAKOVITCH

Moscow’s English translators were clearly overstretched, but it was worth entering the competition just to correspond with the greatest composer of the age.

On Mark Schubart’s recommendation, Van dropped by Cosmos Travel Bureau on West Forty-Fifth Street. A Mr. Reiner in the office negotiated contracts with the Soviet Union, and it turned out that he, too, had had a letter from Shostakovich, in his case asking for advice about how to publicize the competition; the
New York Times
had obliged by publishing a notice. Reiner booked Van on SAS flight 912 to Copenhagen, departing on the twenty-fourth, but Van went back and switched to Air France via Paris to Prague, even though it meant leaving a day earlier. He was getting nervous about taking such a
long trip without anyone to confide in, and he began wheedling people to go along. First he tried Rosina, but she had to teach. Then he asked Sascha Greiner, but he had to work. Finally, he attempted to convince Rosalie Leventritt. In her no-nonsense way, she told him to go alone; it would be the best experience of his life, she said, if he stood on his own two feet. Happily, a compromise presented itself when the
State Department summoned Mark Schubart to Washington. The Juilliard dean presented himself at its Foggy Bottom headquarters and sat in an empty interview room. After some time, an officer walked in and began obscurely explaining how the day was split into three periods, and activities that overlapped more than one day were to be entered in the second period. Eventually Schubart worked out that the State Department wanted an observer to travel to Moscow and file reports; the bureaucratese was standard protocol for submitting expense claims.