Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  The last semifinalist performed Wednesday evening, and for a second time the judges retired to their room. Some were patently nervous. The young Sequeira Costa had quickly gathered that Lev Vlassenko was the “chosen one.” It was far from clear what would happen if an American won instead. Many of the judges were guests in the country, and Khrushchev was as unpredictable as a wounded bull. As for the Soviet judges, they could only guess what kind of retribution the Union of Soviet Composers might dream up if they denied their compatriot first prize.

  Sviatoslav Richter could not have cared less. He was convinced that most of the other judges were either idiots or craven stooges in thrall to the state. To his mind, there were only three real pianists in the competition, with Cliburn clearly first. Again he sent over his marks from the piano. Sequeira Costa watched Gilels’s face as he went through the sheets, stopped at Richter’s, and looked up at him.

  “Why do you do this?” he asked. “Because this is not good for the general marks.”

  “For me,” Richter answered, “people either make music or not music.”

  Kabalevsky chimed in, accusing Richter of the crime of “individualism,” and other members of the jury protested, too. Richter drew a conclusion: “It was the first international competition to be held in Moscow, and it was vital that it should be won by a Soviet pianist.”

  The story was later put about, in part by Richter himself, that he had given all but his three favored competitors zero points. This evolved into a legend that he had awarded Van twenty-five points (or one hundred, in wilder versions) and all the others zero in order to leave only Van standing. In fact, Richter gave Van twenty-five points, Lev Vlassenko twenty-four, and Liu Shikun twenty-three, but he also gave four contestants (Nadia Gedda-Nova of France, Milena Mollova of Bulgaria, Naum Shtarkman, and Daniel Pollack) fifteen points each. All the others, including Eddik Miansarov and Jerome Lowenthal, got zero. The converse theory later spread that there was nothing to the gossip and that Richter had not given any zeros at all. Someone certainly wanted people to believe that: Richter wrote his marks in purple ink, but the zeros were later crossed out and carefully changed in blue ink to threes. Maybe Gilels, who used the same blue ink, doctored the sheets, worried that his handling of the jury would be criticized. Possibly a faceless bureaucrat did it. Or perhaps it was Richter himself, responding in a typically insolent way to a scolding from Gilels or another official; after all, to give thirteen competitors three points each was no less dismissive than giving them zero.

  When the marks were tallied, Lev Vlassenko was in the lead, with 411 points. Second was Liu Shikun, with 404. With 393, Van was tied for third place with Naum Shtarkman. Danny Pollack was fifth, with 345. The result was a relief for the more nervous jurors, who hoped that an awkward and potentially dangerous conflict with the authorities would be headed off. Still, several excellent Soviet pianists had been eliminated, and after more discussion the jury decided to address the Ministry of Culture, asking permission to add an extra prize. The request was granted, and to fit in Eddik Miansarov, the field of finalists expanded from eight to nine. Late at night the contestants were finally called together and the names were read out:

  From the Soviet Union, Lev Vlassenko, Naum Shtarkman, and Eduard Miansarov.

  From America, Van Cliburn and Daniel Pollack.

  From China, Liu Shikun.

  From Bulgaria, Milena Mollova.

  From France, Nadia Gedda-Nova.

  From Japan, Toyoaki Matsuura.

  YET THERE was also the public to worry about. Vanya-mania, a mostly female phenomenon, was seizing Moscow with indecent haste. It had little in common with the Tarzan cult or the previous summer’s wild alfresco couplings. Van brought a different ideal of a man and attracted a different type of admirer: the nice Soviet girl. Well-behaved young Soviet women were not supposed to smoke or drink, frequent nightclubs, wear lipstick, or paint their nails. They studied hard, spoke seriously, dressed conservatively, were strongly patriotic, and thought the West was deeply decadent. Still, it was impossible to see Van, with his curly blond hair and beautiful long fingers, as the enemy. He was kind, and sensitive, and charming, and modest, and very tall, and a bit of a mama’s boy. He disliked rock and roll and espoused Russian virtues such as sentiment and nostalgia. The more they heard about him, the more they found him “just like us.” Girls bearing flowers began pursuing him for autographs. They carefully cut out his photograph from the papers and slept with it under their pillows. Suddenly they had a Westerner they could safely adore. Their mothers could hardly complain, since they, too, had fallen in love with the sweet, vulnerable American. Jerry Lowenthal, who had time on his hands after failing to make the finals—perhaps because his more intellectual style was swept away in the Cliburn wave—had trouble containing his cynicism when women approached him wanting to talk about Van. “He reminds me of my son,” the older ones said with sighs, while their daughters wanted to know if Van was married. Tarzan haircuts were for the chop: suddenly a bushy, curly coiffure was the rage for men and women alike.

  The competition continued without pause, and the finals began Thursday evening. This time every moment was to be beamed to television sets across the USSR.

  Van’s turn came Friday at 7:00 p.m. That morning, he had rehearsed with the renowned Moscow State Symphony, and now he was sitting in the Peking Hotel dining room in full concert dress, staring like a condemned man at the meal spread in front of him. He decided he wasn’t hungry and instead downed in one gulp his preperformance booster of three raw eggs cracked into a glass, yolks intact. A journalist named Paul Moor snapped him in the act. Ten years older than Van, Moor had been around since the start of the competition, which he was covering for Life and Time. He came from El Paso, Texas, had briefly studied at Juilliard, and had been involved with the composer Aaron Copland. Van’s cousin Mrs. Lillian Reid was his old algebra teacher, and when it turned out that Moor, too, had been taught piano by a pupil of Arthur Friedheim, Van must have wondered if there was anyone in the world he could trust more. When it was time, they headed to the conservatory together.

  A picture of pandemonium met their eyes. For three nights, students had camped outside the box office, hoping for a spare seat. Favors had been called in to procure tickets reserved for officials, but even those with high connections had been turned away. Thousands had come to try their luck or witness the event, and they had jammed the courtyard and narrow streets, bringing pedestrian traffic to a standstill. The police were struggling to keep order as ticketless fans tried to rush the line or slip quietly behind it. Those who were caught were roughly dealt with, and as the chaos worsened, KGB guards materialized to keep order. This was not just a musical event; it was a national festival that had taken on the fervency of a mass demonstration.

  In his dressing room, Van downed an assortment of vitamin pills and applied drops to his nose. He sat up straight and put his hands on his knees. His right index finger was bandaged after a cut had opened into a full-length split from too much practicing. He closed his eyes, inhaled in four gulps through his nose until his chest filled out, and exhaled in four bursts. Then he prayed.

  Max Frankel jostled through the crowds, headed up the great staircase, and found his seat near the flower-bedecked stage. Looking around, the journalist saw many familiar faces. Virtually the entire Soviet nomenklatura seemed to be there with its wives, instantly recognizable by their government-store garb copied from the pages of Western fashion magazines. At stage right, the dowager queen Elisabeth sat in the government box alongside Khrushchev’s daughter. Besides the seventeen hundred seated ticket holders, scores stood shoulder to shoulder down the aisles and lined the backs of the balconies. Harriet Wingreen was waiting to watch her fellow Juilliard alum, and Norman Shetler was in the front row. Paul Moor was ready with his camera, and Ambassador Thompson was in place with his wife, Jane.

  Onstage the orchestra tuned up. The jurors took their seats at the front. Richter was especially restless
; perhaps he was still thinking about the poor French girl who had made such a mess of her concerto the previous night that he had felt physically ill.

  Van entered, and the roar seemed to swell the walls. The audience stamped their feet and yelled the now-familiar “Vanya! Vanyusha!” With a sheepish glance of gratitude, Van picked his way between the violas and cellos to the piano. Culture Minister Nikolai Mikhailov, seeing him for the first time, was surprised by both his height and his demeanor: the American was, he thought, “a shy boy, somewhat angular, with a naïve, childishly touching expression on his face; precisely a boy, not a young man.”

  The conductor rapped his baton ineffectively. With gentle hazel eyes set in a sensitive face and eloquent hands that clearly expressed his emotions, Kirill Kondrashin was a man of simple origins who was evangelical about bringing great art to the people. At the morning rehearsal he had bonded in a fatherly way with the young American, while Van had felt miraculously in tune with Kondrashin, as if he were born to play with a Russian conductor.

  Van nodded, Kondrashin raised his stick, and the hall went quiet to hear what the Texas wonder boy would do with their Tchaikovsky First.

  HE LEANED back, eyes half shut, lips pursed to sing, and played to himself the scenes set in the Moscow of his imagination. As he plunged his hands fearlessly into the crashing opening octets, the sound ringing out full and rich as a Russian bell, he was transported back centuries to the old Kremlin, with its Byzantine intrigue and pomp. The czar and czarina entered, followed by their boyars, and took their seats. With the dashing barbarity of the first theme, a grand ballet began. As the melodies weaved together, the mood was bittersweet, like Anna Karenina. The architecture was lucid, the rhythm propulsive, the tone massive but mellifluous, the nuances and shades of sound infinite. There was no affectation; like an actor breathing unsuspected color into a writer’s words, Van felt every movement of the music, bringing out each detail in dazzlingly sharp colors and blending it into the mounting emotional drama.

  The ballet ended, and he was in the second movement, telling the simple story of a peasant women with her baby, his hands tenderly rising and staying suspended for long moments, seemingly weightless. In the middle, at the prestissimo section, he sketched a dream sequence, a fleeting memory of bygone youth. Then a hullabaloo: the baby has woken up. Van’s hands flew abruptly from one side to another, as if he were pushing away heaps of sounds that threatened to engulf him, but his face was a picture of absolute ease.

  Now the last movement was reeling from his fingers: a drunken Russian folk dance, punctuated with explosive hiccups. Here, of all places, where Tchaikovsky had first played his concerto to a horrified Nikolai Rubinstein, Van could feel the sadness-in-happiness of the Russian heart. The tempo was unhurried, the tone lullingly songlike. Imperceptibly the drama intensified, until the gathering energy broke like a thunderstorm that fused together the flashes of scenes and images in one great curtain of sound, a triumphant, exulting climax of freedom and happiness and the glory of life.

  A final furious dash up and down the keys, and applause thundered through the hall. Van bowed, repeatedly. Kondrashin bowed. The orchestra stood up and bowed. The conductor left the stage, and when the buzz finally died down, Van played the tricky “Rondo” by Kabalevsky, who was sitting directly in front of him at the jury table. This time the audience jumped to its feet. The regulations required Van to remain seated and wait for Kondrashin to come back out for the second concerto, an arrangement that would never have stood under professional conditions. Yet, to Van’s embarrassment, he had broken a piano string during the “Rondo,” which his fans took as further proof of his terrific emotional intensity. He was given a five-minute break while the technician attended to the piano, allowing him to get a glass of water and the audience to murmur with bated breath.

  When Kondrashin finally came out, the hall had reached an almost unbearable pitch of emotional tension. Only Van was serene. He felt that God’s blessing had descended on him, and he sat down to play as he had never played in his life.

  Gently he picked out the first muted notes of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in D Minor. To his mind, the liquid work was a one-act opera in which the soloist took all the roles. His tempos were slow, his phrasing generous, and the piano merged with the orchestra to sing a nostalgic lament of remembrance and loss. The sweep was symphonic, but the tone was chastely confiding, as if the powerful swells and delicate shades and sudden avalanches and belligerently ardent lyricism were the inward drama of a searching soul. He heaved upward in electric surges toward the stormy first movement cadenza—and suddenly the audience let out its breath. For the first time in living memory Van was playing the “Ossia” cadenza, the big one that even Rachmaninoff had found too difficult and had substituted with a shorter, simpler passage that nearly every other pianist adopted. His huge hands hurtled into the hard-driving chords, the relentless outburst under complete command. The audience barely noticed the stunning technique: they were transfixed by the experience of watching a boy from Kilgore, Texas, play Russian music more like a Russian than their own musicians. If you’d closed your eyes, though few did, you could have imagined yourself in a time before Stalin’s Terror, before Lenin himself, when, in this very building, Tchaikovsky composed and Rachmaninoff played music that echoed the greatness of the Russian soul. Where did an American get to divine the subtleties of their spirit, the inmost essence of their sacred, scarred culture? To a people so long cut off from the West, it was dizzying and devastatingly moving.

  Already Van was playing the final movement, his long fingers climbing to a farseeing height of divine generosity, reaching still further for an expansive moment of transcendent calm, played out of time. Then the gradual descent to the coda, where the first theme returns, humbler and wiser, the cascading emotions crashing down in a single exhalation until it ended in a joyous surge of sound.

  For a moment, as he bowed his head over the piano, there was absolute silence. Then, like a sea swell, the audience rose as one, as stamping and cheers echoed and reechoed. Next to Max Frankel an elderly Russian musician jumped to his feet. “Just like Rachmaninoff!” he cried. “Just like Rachmaninoff!”

  “Did I hear you right?” Frankel asked.

  “Maybe even better,” the man exulted.

  Van effusively thanked the orchestra and embraced Kondrashin with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, Russian-style, which drove his fans wilder. Ignoring the regulations, the jury stood up and applauded. Richter was crying. Neuhaus and Goldenweiser, who had always been at odds on every issue, hugged one another. Around the hall, groups of students set up a chant of “First prize!” It caught on, even though six of the nine finalists were still to play. Tearful women pushed to the front, proffering huge bouquets of roses. Van shyly took the flowers and slanted offstage to renewed sighs and screams.

  The white-haired Goldenweiser, an old friend of Rachmaninoff’s, labored down the center aisle muttering, “Genius! Genius!” The orchestra players were smiling and joking, tiredness forgotten in the knowledge that they were part of a red-letter day in Soviet music.

  Gilels made his way backstage. He had always been careful to play the consummate party loyalist, but now he walked straight up to Van and threw his arms round him. So did Kondrashin. The veteran English composer Sir Arthur Bliss bustled over: “Oh my dear boy, you played wonderfully today,” he said with a sigh. “I admire your gift and I will go down on my knees in front of you, I would give you the biggest, highest prize possible, but, alas, I cannot do this.” They hugged each other, and both cried.

  The applause showed no sign of letting up, and after a hasty consultation the judges agreed on a blatant violation of the rules. Gilels took the young American by the hand, led him out a second time, and kissed him in full view of the party bosses. As Van demurely bowed, a salvo of precious pictures, historic program notes, and old diamond jewelry flew toward him. Dazed, he picked his way through heaps of flowers. There were flowers inside
the piano and flowers falling from the air. He caught some and pressed them to his heart. Finally, the orchestra abandoned all restraint, stood up, and joined in the celebration.

  The clamor reached the ears of the crowds still pushing outside the conservatory. “Vanya! Vanya!” they shouted. “Kleeburn! Kleeburn!” the audience returned. Now they were clapping rhythmically in unison, a peculiarly Russian compliment.

  Frankel looked around in disbelief. The standing ovation lasted eight and a half minutes. No one could remember anything like it in the ninety-two-year history of the Moscow Conservatory.

  Finally, the stage was reset for the night’s second finalist, Eddik Miansarov. By the time he came on, a large part of the audience had walked out.

  Outside, the police and military cordons collapsed. Fans climbed up fire escapes and across roofs, and riots broke out as the authorities tried to restrain them. Van stayed safely inside, venturing out only at midnight, still surrounded by admiring friends. Teachers came up and told him they had believed only Russians could really feel Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. “We were mistaken,” they said, half in wonder and half in chagrin. Inside the doors, he glanced at the bill board where posters advertising forthcoming concerts were pinned up. A large sheet announced a solo recital to be given by the winner of the piano competition the following Friday. Space had been left for the name, but students had already written in “VAN CLIBURN” so many times that there was no room left. As always in the Soviet Union, there was a political message behind the mischief making. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who had managed to squeeze into the concert, was in no doubt that Van had to win. Yet he and his fellow students half-feared that the conservatory’s party functionaries might get a call from the Central Committee Secretariat and that it would all be hushed up as if it had never happened.