How a Texan helped thaw the Cold War
Biography recounts story of pianist Van Cliburn
‘Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story — How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War’ By Nigel Cliff Harper, 464 pp., $28.99
It has become legend by now: In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, a lanky, baby-faced pianist from Texas stunned the world by going to Russia and winning that country’s most prestigious music competition. Van Cliburn single-handedly inspired a thaw in the Cold War and, at home, became as famous as Elvis.
But in his new biography, “Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story: How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War,” British historian Nigel Cliff demonstrates that maybe we don’t really know the story after all, at least not in its full richness, drama, humanity and complexity.
Beginning shortly after Cliburn’s death in 2013, Cliff interviewed scores of people around the world. He gained access to thousands of pages of documents, including the jury slips from the international Tchaikovsky Competition, the personal notes of Cliburn’s teacher at the Juilliard School and investigative records from the State Department and the FBI.
The result is an elegant, insightful and ultimately definitive account of one of the 20th century’s most compelling events, and the extraordinary artist and person at the heart of it.
Cliff, whose previous work includes “The Shakespeare Riots,” the chronicle of a bloody American episode of the mid-1800s, and a book on the voyages of explorer Vasco da Gama, had been searching for a new topic, preferably involving the Cold War or music.
“They had been in my mind, and when I read Van’s obituary, the whole thing just clicked for me,” he said in a recent interview. “I knew very little about it. I thought, ‘My God, this is such a beautiful and important story. People should know about it. It’s faded away.’”
Early on in his research, Cliff watched film footage of Cliburn’s Moscow triumph, with starry-eyed young women clutching the edge of the stage and a packed concert hall about to erupt.
“He is such a presence, an angelic figure,” Cliff said. “You can see him, this light in the darkness of the Cold War. That simple idea drew me to the story in the first place. The facts fit the feeling.”
The book is a chilling reconstruction of the times: the death of Joseph Stalin, the rise of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, heightening tensions between the United States and the USSR, and Russia’s launch of the first satellite, Sputnik.
“In the age of civil defense and air-raid sirens, when schoolchildren practiced crouching under desks or in dark basements while clasping their heads to keep their skulls from flying apart, people needed no help to be afraid,” Cliff wrote. “Men and women interviewed on the news asked the same question: If Russia had Sputnik, what else did they have up there?”
Into the moment stepped young Cliburn, the son of an East Texas oilman, a prodigy who had been taught piano by his mother. Texas would certainly not contain his talent; at 18, he auditioned at Juilliard, where legendary teacher Rosina Lhévinne found space for him in her class.
By 23, Cliburn had won the prestigious Leventritt Competition in New York, but his early career had been up and down. He had needed to be begged to enter the first Tchaikovsky Competition, created by the Soviets to showcase the fact that their superiority extended to matters of culture.
Then came the Moscow madness, as Cliburn transfixed the people of a Cold War enemy, playing Russian music: Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
“It was impossible to see Van, with his curly blond hair and beautiful long fingers, as the enemy,” Cliff writes. “He was kind, and sensitive and charming, and modest, and very tall, and a bit of a mama’s boy. He disliked rock ’n’ 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.”
As had the rest of the nation. Khrushchev apparently did not hesitate to bless the decision of the jury. Cliburn was named the winner.
“I think you get the national sense of relief on both sides,” Cliff said in the recent interview. “It turned out they were all human beings and could get on with each other. The frontpage picture of Khrushchev and Van hugging made a massive impact psychologically on people.
“It didn’t change the machinations of the political game, but it did change the temperature. It sort of warmed up the Cold War.”
Cliburn’s homecoming included a historic ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, appearances on national television and then an inhuman schedule to keep up with concert demands.
During Khrushchev’s state visit to the United States in 1959, front-page photos captured the renewed affection between the Soviet leader and his young American friend. There were investigations by the FBI and State Department, inspired by the guileless, apolitical artist’s unabashed love for Mother Russia.
“With his patriotism under fire,” Cliff writes, “Van was forced to state publicly that he was not a Communist or a Soviet agent, though he refused to apologize for his taste in friends. ‘These are my kind of people,’ he defiantly said of the Russians.”
In 1978, Cliburn stepped away from the keyboard and, seven years later, moved with his mother from New York to Fort Worth, the home of the prestigious international piano competition that bears his name.
“He was grateful for everything but ready to give it all up, for the same reason he had coped remarkably well with fame: He did not care all that much for it,” Cliff writes.
The book’s most ascendant passages come toward the last, with the description of Cliburn’s re-emergence in December 1987. It was the tense Washington, D.C., summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Cliburn’s White House recital ended with an impromptu rendition of “Moscow Nights.”
“The solemn occasion has turned into a full-throated sing-along,” Cliff writes. “Flashbulbs are popping. The Russians start applauding. Van stands up on the last note, gives a couple of hand claps to the choir, and bounds down to the guests of honor. Gorbachev jumps to his feet. Van hugs him, kisses him on the cheeks, pats him warmly on the back, speaks in his ear; and grasps his shoulder. … Vice President Bush watches them leave with a look of patrician wonder. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in this house,’ he says. … Nancy Reagan will call the performance one of the greatest moments of her husband’s presidency.”
Cliburn kept a sporadic performance schedule after that, until his death from cancer in 2013 at the age of 78.
“He was taught to serve people through music,” the author said. “That was one key to the man, I think. He was an extremely amazing and touching individual. He maintained his gentleness, even when he was a superstar. He was an ordinary person, not a politician.”