Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  In November he went to dinner at Rosina’s. As they leafed through the brochure, talked over the requirements, and sized up his chances, Van began to get agitated. “The gold medal!” he exclaimed. Yet he was still far from convinced. A campaign got under way, in the course of which Sascha Greiner took him to lunch three times. “Dear Van, I beg of you, please go,” he wheedled. Eugene Istomin, the pianist who had been on the Leventritt jury, took him to lunch at Reuben’s, a celebrity hangout on East Fifty-Eighth Street. They both seemed convinced that Van could win. Mark Schubart, the Juilliard dean, began looking for sponsorship; the brochure explained that Moscow would take care of accommodation, maintenance, and return transportation but not the outbound airfare. First Schubart tried the Music Committee of the president’s People-to-People Program, another Eisenhower initiative aimed at fostering international understanding. The committee referred the matter to the State Department and came back with the information that State favored American participation and would place no restrictions on travel but also would provide no funds. Schubart wrote to Van informing him of the situation and then turned to the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music Program. Its administrator, the retired broadcaster César Saerchinger, indicated that the program was minded to offer a thousand dollars per contestant. Schubart was keen to avoid a repetition of the row that had roiled the music world when his boss, Bill Schuman, fought tooth and nail to send the Juilliard Orchestra to the upcoming Brussels World’s Fair with government funds Schuman had voted for as a member of the Music Panel. Rather than propose Juilliard alumni to the Rockefeller program, Schubart spoke with David Wodlinger of the Institute of International Education and suggested that the IIE form a committee to choose the contestants itself. He followed up with a letter recommending that there be no preliminary trials or publicity, since the only hope of being well represented “devolves on our being able to send to Moscow, not students, but young professionals, preferably with a good deal of concert experience. This caliber of young artist would undoubtedly not wish to participate in a competition to take part in a competition.” The IIE duly invited Schubart to be a member of the special committee, and on December 10 he called Bill Judd to tell him that Van had been nominated. Judd requested a formal letter, presumably so he could get Van out of the commitments he had made on his behalf, and Schubart obliged. The only other contestant chosen was Juilliard violinist Joyce Flissler, who had toured South America with the backing of Schuman’s Music Panel. A few Americans who were already abroad, including Van’s former classmates Daniel Pollack and Jerome Lowenthal, sent word that they would enter under their own steam; otherwise, no one else was both talented enough and willing to go.

  Van, more in debt than ever, told Schubart he didn’t need the money. “Take it,” Schubart insisted. “You’re crazy if you don’t.” Van was still wavering, but he decided to get ready just in case. There was a vast amount of music to prepare, and though he had already mastered some, a lot was new. The first round took in Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Liszt as well as Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky, but the second-round program consisted almost entirely of music by Russian or Soviet composers, some barely known in the West. The finals, if he reached them, required a concerto by Tchaikovsky, a specially commissioned work by a Soviet composer that would be circulated two months prior to the competition, and another concerto of the contestant’s choice. There was never any doubt that Van would choose Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, but for the other concerto, he settled on perhaps the most demanding piano work of all: Rachmaninoff’s Orientally rich Third Piano Concerto. When Van was fifteen he heard a recording of Rachmaninoff playing the piece, which was notorious for its technical challenges and struck fear into many pianists. Though Rildia Bee had given Van the music, and he had taken it everywhere with him, he had bided his time learning it until 1954. Then, without telling Rosina, he finally began, first humming and singing his way through, as Mother had taught him. It was a daring and dangerous choice.

  Rosina gave up her Sundays, which were usually reserved for rest and trips to the country. “I won’t charge you now, but you can pay me back after you win in Moscow,” she half-joked. They worked together for three, sometimes four or five hours. “We have only three months in which to get ready,” she prodded him at the start. “You must live as though you really were in training. See nobody and go nowhere five days of the week and be in bed by eleven.” Remember the Russian proverb, she said, “Without hard work you can’t even pull a fish out of the pond.” When he got going, his ambition flared up again, and he practiced as much as ten hours a day. Still, he refused to commit.

  The application form carried the instruction that it must reach Moscow no later than December 31, and on the day Rosina left for California to spend Christmas with her children she convinced Van to send it off. He could always pull out later, she reasoned, but if he delayed any longer all their work would be wasted. The required information about his schooling, awards, and chosen program had already been typed in, but at the last minute he dithered over the music, crossed out three pieces, and wrote in three more. As instructed, he attached three nine-by-six-centimeter photographs, a certified copy of his Juilliard diploma, and a negative of his birth certificate, which came complete with tiny hand- and footprints. Then he rushed to the post office. Even by express mail, it was impossible to predict whether the package would get to Moscow on time during the holiday season, and he followed it with a telegram to Shostakovich:

  HAVE JUST MAILED MY APPLICATION TONIGHT DECEMBER TWENTIETH HOPING IT REACHES YOU IN TIME.

  A few days later Van headed out of town for his two scheduled community concerts in Ohio and Michigan. By the first he was feeling feverish, but he played both dates. The fever worsened as he flew back to New York, and when he stepped into a grocery store, he dropped to the floor in a faint. The doctor diagnosed a bad flu—in other reports, a flare-up of colitis—and prescribed bed rest, though months of anxiety had undoubtedly contributed to his collapse.

  Probably it would not have helped his recuperation to know that one foreign competitor had already arrived in Moscow and was working even more single-mindedly than he.

  LIKE VAN, Liu Shikun started learning the piano at age three, though he had even less choice in the matter. His businessman father, who had trained as a singer and was determined to see his son succeed as a classical musician, sat him on his knee and taught him, getting him to memorize each piece by singing it out. By six, Liu was performing Mozart concertos in his hometown of Tianjin, a treaty port near Beijing then under Japanese occupation, and at ten, the year the Communists won the Chinese Civil War, he took first prize in a national piano competition. Liu entered the conservatory and progressed so fast that he represented China at the prestigious Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest when he was seventeen. Politically savvy from growing up amid war and clashing ideologies, he was convinced it was a fix when first prize went to a Soviet pianist named Lev Vlassenko and Liu placed third; that year, 1956, relations between China and the Soviet Bloc had dramatically soured when Mao angrily denounced Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and rebuked him for revisionism.

  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 d
ates 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