Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (2 page)

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.”

The 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.

The first wave of Russian refugees already dominated American music when a second influx arrived. In 1939 the composer Igor Stravinsky steamed away from war-torn Europe and settled in sunny
West Hollywood, where he joined an unlikely Los Angeles diaspora that included the choreographer George Balanchine (born Giorgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg), the Lithuanian violinist Jascha Heifetz, and the sensational pianist Arthur Rubinstein, born in a region of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire. Horowitz moved in, as did Rachmaninoff, who bought a house in Beverly Hills not far from the self-consciously diminutive Stravinsky, who called his fellow Russian composer a
“six-and-a-half-foot scowl.”

The year after Feklisov’s visit to the baths, the capitalist United States and the Communist Soviet Union became unlikely allies in World War II. Music was an effective way of strengthening the ties of war, less blatant and perhaps more effective than
Hollywood movies that whitewashed Stalin’s scandalous show trials or featured Soviet collective farms filled with Ukrainian peasants (millions of whom, in real life, had been wiped out by famine) dancing merrily in pressed white shirts with flowers twined in their tresses. The greatest musical bond was forged when the microfilmed score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s
Leningrad Symphony
(written during the hellish 872-day siege of the former St. Petersburg in which a million perished) was flown to the West and performed in London and New York before its
premiere in Leningrad. In New York the symphony was the subject of a pitched battle between conductors, and in six months it was performed
sixty-two times across America.

Never, not even in Tchaikovsky’s time, had Russian music been more admired, honored, or glorified; never had it been more
American.

FIRST MOVEMENT

Sognando

•
1
•

The Prodigy

RILDIA BEE
O’Bryan Cliburn’s proudest day was the day her son was born. She was thirty-seven and had been married to Harvey Lavan Cliburn for eleven childless years. He was two years younger, a native of Mississippi whom she had met at an evening prayer meeting soon after breaking an engagement to a dentist. When she went to him one day in 1933 and said,
“Sug, I think we’re going to have a little baby,” it seemed a miracle to them both. The following July 12 he came to her bedside at Tri-State Sanitarium in Shreveport, Louisiana—
room 322, the number part of their personal liturgy—and smiled.
“Babe,” he said in his laconic drawl, “we have a little boy, and this is our family.” The smiles dimmed when they differed over what to name the child—he wanted his son to have his name; she was not minded to raise a Junior—before harmony was restored with a compromise. The birth certificate duly recorded the debut of
“Harvey Lavan (Van) Cliburn,” but Rildia Bee made sure the child was never called anything but Van.

Her second-proudest day was the day she
met Sergei Rachmaninoff. It was two years earlier, and she was on a committee of musically minded ladies who had invited the Russian to Shreveport. The Cliburns had moved to the city after her father, William Carey O’Bryan, who was mayor of McGregor, Texas, as well as a judge, state legislator, and newspaperman, convinced his son-in-law to make a career in oil. At the time, Harvey was a
railroad station agent, but since his
dream of being a doctor had been dashed in the Great War, and one thing was as good as another, he gamely signed up as a roving crude oil purchasing agent. Rildia Bee’s dream was to be a concert pianist, and she had indeed been on the brink of a career when her parents pulled her back from the unseemly business of performing in public. Since her mother, Sirrildia, had been a semiprofessional actress—the only kind in those parts—that seemed a little unfair, but perhaps it was not, because Sirrildia refashioned herself into that primmest of creatures, a local historian, and the family was trying to put its stage days behind it. Rildia Bee dutifully demoted herself to teaching piano, which was why she was on the Shreveport concert committee and came to tend personally to Rachmaninoff.