Moscow Nights Read online

  Dedication

  For my son, Orlando

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prelude in Two Parts

  FIRST MOVEMENT:

  Sognando 1. The Prodigy

  2. Room 412

  3. The Successor

  4. Van Cliburn Days

  5. The Secret Speech

  6. The Red Moon

  SECOND MOVEMENT:

  Volante 7. To Russia, with Love

  8. “Vanya, Vanyusha!”

  9. “We Are in Orbit”

  10. “American Sputnik”

  11. The Last Romantic

  12. “He Played the Piano and the World Was His”

  13. “He’s Better Than Elvis by Far!”

  14. In the Heat of the Kitchen

  15. Khrushchev in the Capitalist Den

  16. Back in the USSR

  17. Sole Diplomacy

  18. Endgame

  THIRD MOVEMENT:

  Pianoforte 19. America’s Pianist

  20. Great Expectations

  21. The Summit

  Coda

  Photo section

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Nigel Cliff

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  ON MAY 28, 1958, ticker tape snowed from the sky above Broadway, darkening an already gray New York City day and flurrying around rapturous, flag-waving crowds. High school bands marched, Fire Department colors trooped, and at the center of it all was a young American perched on the back of an open-top Continental, grinning in disbelief and crossing his hands over his heart. He was as tall, thin, and blond as Charles Lindbergh, but he was not a record-setting aviator. Nor was he an Olympic athlete or a world statesman or a victor in war. The cause of the commotion was a twenty-three-year-old classical pianist from a small town in Texas who had recently taken part in a music competition.

  “What’s goin’ on here?” a stalled taxi driver yelled to a cop. “A parade? Fer the piano player?”

  The cabbie had a point. No musician had ever been honored like this. No American pianist had been front-page news, let alone a household name. But the confetti was whirling, the batons were twirling, and on a damp morning a hundred thousand New Yorkers were cheering and climbing on cars and screaming and dashing up for a kiss. In the summer of 1958, Van Cliburn was not only the most famous musician in America. He was just about the most famous person in America—and barring the president, quite possibly the most famous American in the world.

  Things got stranger. At a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were bitter enemies in a perilous Cold War, the Russians had gone mad for him before Americans had. Two months earlier he had arrived in Moscow, a gangly, wide-eyed kid on his first overseas trip, to try his luck in the First International Tchaikovsky Competition. Such was the desperate state of world affairs that even musical talent counted as ammunition in the battle of beliefs, and everyone understood that the Soviets had cranked open the gates only to prove that their virtuosos were the best. Yet for once in the tightly plotted Cold War, the authors had to tear up the script, for the real story of the Tchaikovsky Competition was beyond the imagination of the most ingenious propagandist. The moment the young American with the shock of flaxen curls sat before the piano, a powerful new weapon exploded across the Soviet Union. That weapon was love: one man’s love for music, which ignited an impassioned love affair between him and an entire nation.

  It came at a critical time. Five months earlier the Soviet Union had sensationally beaten the United States into space. Even now, shiny metal sputniks were whizzing above American roofs, which suddenly seemed puny shields against a newly menacing sky. In this hallucinatory and panicked age, Van Cliburn gained the trappings of a rock star: sold-out stadiums, platinum albums, screaming groupies, and vindictive rivals. The implausible extent of his fame was captured when the Elvis Presley Fan Club of Chicago switched allegiance and changed its name to the Van Cliburn Fan Club. He brought millions of people to classical music, yet more than a pianist, he was a talisman: a locus of hopes that through his music he could heal a troubled world.

  He hoped so, too, but the moment of youthful glory that made him also trapped him. An innocent required to play a global role, a gregarious charmer obsessed with privacy, a model of piety with a rebellious streak, a driven man who could be hopelessly dysfunctional, a patriot who loved Communist Russia, a man-child who was old when young and young when old, a lover of aristocracy proud of his humble Texas roots, a modest man who was not above embellishing his own legend—Van was both what he seemed and not what he seemed. As the Cold War lurched from one crisis to another, he played on, returning emotionally to Moscow, courted by presidents and Politburo members, watched by the FBI and KGB, and closely guarding a secret that could have destroyed him overnight. In those days when clashing ideologies counted no cost in human lives too high, he stood impotently by while several of his fellow competitors met with tragic fates. While superpower relations plumbed new depths, he disappeared to become America’s most famous recluse, his one-man musical peace mission seemingly a busted flush. Yet, just when all looked lost, the legend of Van Cliburn would rise again to answer the call of history.

  Based on numerous interviews and newly revealed evidence from Russian and American archives, this book tells the full story of Van Cliburn and the Tchaikovsky Competition for the first time. That story is inextricably linked to the Cold War, which turned a music competition into an event of global significance, and its main players, especially Nikita Khrushchev and the U.S. presidents he tangled with: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It also takes us through the remarkable careers of the piano concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, written at the height of Romanticism, that supplied the unlikely sound track to three decades of global conflict.

  If Van’s tale resonates particularly strongly today, that may be because events overtook the writing of this book. A window on a recent but seemingly vanished world now opens onto terrain that looks all too familiar. While we contemplate talk of a new Cold War, it can be illuminating to recall that Russia and America have had a love-hate relationship for a long while. Both nations became world powers at the same time, as multiethnic states with one foot in Europe with its old-world refinement and the other in their vast rude hinterlands. Both were ideologically extreme nations with utopian identities: America the shining city on a hill; Russia the third Rome and the chalice of true faith, be it Orthodox or Communist. Yet whereas America promoted happiness through freedom, Russia sought stability through autocracy. And while America’s exemplary heroes were businessmen and industrialists, Russia’s were artists who peered into the human soul with an unmatched intensity.

  The conflict between these young-old nations defined the second half of the twentieth century not only because of their military might but also because of the stark choice thrown up by their distinctly different views of human nature. Yet deep down there was common ground, waiting to be rediscovered. It was unexpected that it happened through music, but in a way it was a return to form. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was no place that loved Russian music more than America—not even Russia itself.

  Prelude in Two Parts

  A SHORT STORY ABOUT TCHAIKOVSKY . . .

  BY 1874, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky had been professor of theory and harmony at the Moscow Conservatory for each of the eight long years since it opened its doors. The grand title belied a desultory salary (fifty rubles a month), and the thirty-four-year-old musician supplemente
d his income by working as a roving critic. Both jobs took him away from composing, which had yet to earn him more than lukewarm praise. To Russians his music was too Western, to Europeans too unmannered; one Viennese critic contemptuously likened it to “the brutish, grim jollity of a Russian church festival” where “we see nothing but common, ravaged faces, hear rough oaths, and smell cheap liquor.” So when Tchaikovsky decided to write his first piano concerto that year, he set out to meld Western and Russian musical practices into a new style that would win universal approval and finally let him quit his tiresome post. In bold strokes he conceived a big, virtuosic work brimming with catchy folk themes: a melody he heard performed by blind beggars at a market and others taken from Russian and Ukrainian folk songs and a French chansonette, “Il faut s’amuser, danser et rire.” By late December the concerto was sketched out, and he inscribed a dedication to Nikolai Rubinstein, the founder and director of the conservatory and a fine pianist in his own right. Tchaikovsky hoped Rubinstein would agree to give the premiere, and on Christmas Eve, before heading out to a party, Rubinstein asked the reticent composer to play the concerto through.

  Dusk was settling as the two men met in the deserted school and chose a classroom. Outside, the snow muffled the bells pealing the Royal Hours and the chatter of girls waiting to tell their marriage fortunes. All was peaceful as Tchaikovsky took his place at the piano and Rubinstein settled down to listen.

  The composer played the tumultuous first movement. Rubinstein did not move or say a word. Fearing the worst, Tchaikovsky toiled through the entire concerto. Again there was silence.

  “Well?” he ventured.

  Rubinstein began quietly, continued intemperately, and finally, Tchaikovsky thought, let fly like “Zeus hurling thunderbolts.” The concerto was utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable, bad, trivial, and vulgar. Some passages were so trite and clumsy that nothing could be done with them; others were plagiarism, pure and simple. The director sprang to the piano and dashed off crude parodies of Tchaikovsky’s choicest phrases: “Here for instance, this”—making a monstrous jangle—“now what’s all that? And this? How can anyone . . .” he trailed away, leaving a thick vapor of disdain and disappointment in the air.

  Tchaikovsky was notoriously touchy about his music, and felt violated. “An impartial bystander would necessarily have believed that I was a stupid, ignorant, conceited note-scratcher, who was so impudent as to show his scribble to a celebrated man,” he would write his patroness Nadezhda von Meck three years later, still bitterly aggrieved. He stormed out and headed upstairs to his studio. Rubinstein followed and pulled him into another empty room. The whole piece was impossible, Rubenstein repeated, and would have to be completely overhauled, but if Tchaikovsky reworked it according to his instructions, and did so in good time, he would consent to play it at his concert.

  “I shall not alter a single note,” the indignant composer retorted. “I shall publish the work exactly as it is!” In the event, he made one change: he scratched out the dedication to Rubinstein and wrote in the name of the pianist Hans von Bülow, whose acquaintance he had just made. Bülow was a giant of the German music scene who had married musical royalty in the tall, angular form of Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima before losing her to Richard Wagner, two of whose greatest operas, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Bülow had conducted at their premieres. As soon as Bülow received the score, he wrote an effusive letter of praise to a delighted and relieved Tchaikovsky.

  Bülow was about to embark on an American tour, and he premiered the concerto in Boston on October 25, 1875. Only four first violins could be rounded up in time, and the rest of the orchestra was patchy at best. An American composer reported the result: “They had not rehearsed much and the trombones got in wrong in the ‘tutti’ in the middle of the first movement, whereupon Bülow sang out in a perfectly audible voice, ‘The brass may go to hell.’” One Boston Brahmin declared in a review that the concerto was hardly destined to become classical, but it was a sensation with the public, even more so when it was repeated in less straitlaced New York a month later. Bülow featured it in 139 of his 172 American concerts. Anton Rubinstein, the fiery, raven-haired, fat-fingered virtuoso who founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the Romantic Russian school of piano playing, took it up. Even his paler, steelier brother, Nikolai, eventually relented and played it many times. Tchaikovsky made a peace offering by dedicating his Second Piano Concerto to Nikolai, but the pianist died before he could perform it. Instead, in 1881, it, too, premiered in the United States, with the English-born pianist Madeline Schiller and the Philharmonic Society of New York.

  Tchaikovsky was fascinated that his work had been more warmly welcomed in the United States than in his own country. In 1891, now world-famous and long liberated from his teaching duties, he eagerly accepted an invitation to open the newly built Carnegie Hall. “It turns out that I am ten times better known in America than in Europe,” he wrote his nephew from New York:

  At first when they told me that, I thought that it was an exaggerated compliment, but now I see that it is the truth. Works of mine that are still unknown in Moscow are performed here several times a season, and whole reviews and commentaries are written on them (e.g., Hamlet). I am far more of a big shot here than in Russia. Is it not curious!!!

  The visitor was impressed by the vastness of the city, the hospitality of his hosts, and the comfort of his hotel room, with its gas and electric light, private bathroom and lavatory, and apparatus for speaking to reception. Yet his thoughts turned constantly to home, and he decided that at fifty he was too old to experience travel as anything other than a mild form of punishment. Well-wishers and autograph hunters mobbed him everywhere he went, giving him no quarter, and when he conducted his own works in the new hall, including the now-canonical Piano Concerto no. 1, the bright lights on Fifty-Seventh Street flared on a line of carriages that crawled for a quarter of a mile queuing to drop off eager concertgoers. After a brief tour he left, never to come back, and two years later he was dead.

  The First Piano Concerto went on to become the calling card of many a visiting virtuoso; in the following decades, both Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz made sensational American debuts with the work. But it would take a young pianist from Texas to make it the most famous piece of classical music in the world. Tchaikovsky would have been less surprised than most.

  . . . AND ANOTHER ABOUT RACHMANINOFF

  IN 1941 a twenty-seven-year-old Soviet spy named Alexander Feklisov set out from his Manhattan office and headed downtown on an urgent mission. Among his regular duties, Feklisov was the handler of Julius Rosenberg, later to be executed alongside his wife, Ethel, for nuclear espionage, but for now all normal activity was on hold. Earlier that year Adolf Hitler had launched the most massive and perhaps most brutal invasion in history against the Soviet Union, and the spy’s delicate assignment was to press New York’s leading Russian émigrés to contribute to the defense of the motherland they had fled.

  Feklisov made for the Russian bathhouse on the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue. As he opened the doors, the smooth, sweet sound of a well-trained choir flowed out. In the big reception hall, middle-aged men with sheets knotted round their waists were sitting on couches singing Russian and Ukrainian songs, perfectly in tune and unison. One very tall old man with his back turned to the newcomer was strumming along quietly on a guitar.

  After undressing, Feklisov went to get a beer and asked the barman what was going on. “Don’t you know them?” the man asked in surprise. “This is the world-famous choir of the Don Cossacks, with its leader Sergei Zharov.” He pointed to Zharov, a short man seated next to the tall guitarist. As the spy’s glance moved onto the guitar player’s long gray face, he recognized him as Sergei Rachmaninoff.

  “They often come here,” the barman added, “and sing whenever they feel up to it. Sometimes Rachmaninoff comes along, and then they sing under his direction.”

  Th
e Cossacks chanted the low first notes of “Vecherniy Zvon,” a beloved folk song that evoked an evening chorus of Russian church bells. Suddenly the languid composer was transformed. He drew himself up; broke in several times with instructons about pauses, tempo, and volume; then got up, put his guitar aside, and started conducting. Now the portly choir sang each word distinctly and precisely, in rapturous voices trembling with nostalgia:

  Evening bells

  Evening bells

  How many thoughts

  They arouse!

  O youthful days

  Where I was born and bred

  Where I first loved

  Where father’s house stands

  And now how I,

  On forever parting,

  Have heard the bells

  For my last time.

  The spy sat transfixed, transported despite himself to an old Russia that no longer existed and that he had barely known. At the end, Rachmaninoff and the choir got dressed, knocked back a shot of vodka, and drifted out into the chilly New York night. Feklisov never met the great musician again, but soon afterward an unknown man arrived at his office in the East Sixty-First Street consulate and handed over a large chunk of Rachmaninoff’s concert fees, along with assurances of his love and devotion to his homeland.

  The Russian Revolution had been a gift to American music lovers. Fleeing the Bolsheviks on an open sled with his wife, his two daughters, and a bag of notebooks and scores, in 1918 Rachmaninoff had retaken New York—where nine years earlier he had premiered his most famous piano concerto, the Third—outdazzling even the American debut of his brilliant compatriot Sergei Prokofiev, who had arrived earlier that year, though perhaps not the white-hot piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, who defected in 1925 with American dollar bills and British pound notes stuffed into his shoes. Rachmaninoff made a great deal of money in America, but even after transforming his New York home into the scene of all-Russian soirees, complete with Russian guests, servants, and rituals, he was painfully homesick and scrupulously avoided agents of the despised Soviet regime. Feklisov grew so curious about the fabled musician that he bought a ticket to see him at Carnegie Hall out of his own pocket.