Piano man

Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War. By Nigel Cliff. Harper; 452 pages; $28.99. To be published in Britain in November; £20.

ONE night in April 1958, the cold war was broken by a gap-toothed smile. The jury of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow had reached a near-unanimous decision and the audience was going wild over the likely winner: a 23-year-old Texan called Van Cliburn. But Stalin was barely five years dead and no one was going to risk a spell in Siberia by awarding first prize to an American. So a nervous Emil Gilels, a pianist, was dispatched to see the minister of culture, and the minister went trembling to report to the Communist Party chief, Nikita Khrushchev, who was just back from reimposing Russian terror in Budapest.

“We don’t know what to do,” bleated the minister, presenting the jury’s report.

“Is he the best?” Khrushchev demanded. “In that case, give him the first prize.”

The Soviet leader followed up with a beaming public bear-hug for the victorious Cliburn, who towered a head above the pudgy Khrushchev. In that historic freeze-frame, the cold-war ice cap began to melt.

Nigel Cliff, a British journalist and one-time contributor to The Economist, has written a freshly sourced account of these momentous Moscow nights. He places them aptly at the heart of the nuclear conflict and poignantly in the personal odyssey of a lanky, gay pianist from a small prairie town who never wanted to do much except play Russian music. His mother, it was said, had once met Rachmaninoff.

When the Soviet Union announced a contest that would demonstrate cultural and educational superiority over a decadent West, Cliburn was living in digs near Carnegie Hall, taking lessons with Rosina Lhevinne at the Juilliard School. He had always wanted to see Moscow and many other Westerners were too scared to go. The Russians rustled up two front-runners, Lev Vlassenko and Naum Shtarkman. The Chinese sent Liu Shikun. But from the moment Cliburn first played, the Moscow public took him to their hearts. He had a unique stage presence, at once languid and intense, projecting an almost papal serenity. No other pianist matched Cliburn’s poise or his physical appeal. The inimitable Sviatoslav Richter, a loner in the jury room, reportedly awarded him full marks for each round and zero to other contenders. In the streets of Moscow the winner was mobbed like a Hollywood star.

His victory made headlines in New York, but it took two days for the State Department to wire official congratulations and even longer for President Eisenhower to respond. Returning home to a ticker-tape parade, Cliburn insisted on being conducted in America by Kirill Kondrashin, a Russian, thus doing all he could to extend the cultural thaw, even as the Cuban crisis was growing.

Cliburn enjoyed a life of glory, with a Texas piano competition endowed in his name and recordings that sold in millions. Arriving once in Washington, DC, without his concert wear, he borrowed tie and tails from a fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson. Leaders of both powers vied for his attention. Spy agencies kept him under a wary eye. Cliburn returned to Moscow for the last time in 2011, two years before his death, to serve as honorary chairman of the Tchaikovsky piano competition. He did not vote for fear of harming another artist.

His fellow runners-up in 1958 all had to give up music. Vlassenko became a teacher, Shtarkman spent eight years in Soviet jails for homosexuality and Mr Liu was incarcerated for seven years during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Cliburn knew that his glory was earned at the expense of his Moscow friends. Mr Cliff does well, despite some musical infelicities, to describe the big game of culture wars and Khrushchev’s capricious adventurism. Cliburn himself remains an enigma, even if his triumph was to show that music sometimes has the power to shape history.