Review -- Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff

Khrushchev’s desire to mark a new era in Soviet life had a drastic effect on an American musician, enmeshing concert pianist Van Cliburn so thoroughly in Cold War politics that to the end of his life he seldom broke free. In 1958, at the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, Khrushchev learned that the judges were in a quandary. The rules of the game had been rigged to ensure a Soviet performer would win, but the judges, including greats such as pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels and composers Dmitri Kabalevsky and Aram Khachaturian, agreed that the 23-year-old Texan clearly outshone all the others. His grand, expressive, Romantic style was more Russian than the Russians’. Khrushchev said simply that if Cliburn was the best, the gold medal should go to him. When the win was announced, it created a sensation in the midst of Cold War hostilities, with Cliburn gaining instant, world-wide fame, on a rock-star scale. In New York he was given a ticker-tape parade. In the Soviet Union where, even before the win, his warm, open-hearted personality had charmed the public, waves of adulation swept across the country, never really to subside.

Moscow Nights by Nigel Cliff tells the story of Van Cliburn’s Russian connections. The book begins, perhaps appropriately but very oddly, with a chapter on Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the internal Soviet politics that led up to the Tchaikovsky Competition. Although Cliburn had not traveled outside the U.S. before arriving in Moscow, Russian music was in his blood, inherited directly from his mother and teacher, a pianist whose great boast was that she once met Rachmaninoff at a minor concert in Louisiana. And at the Juilliard School in New York Cliburn was immersed even more deeply in Russian Romantic pianism by the great Russian teacher, Rosina Lhévinne. The Tchaikovsky competition was a natural for him.

As its title suggests, Moscow Nights presents Cliburn’s life with a strong Russian filter. Given the source of his fame, this is not so objectionable. It certainly makes for a pleasant and readable book, sure to be treasured by his die-hard fans. Anecdote piles upon anecdote, sometimes amounting to an hour-by-hour narrative of a concert and reception or a weekend in Washington or Moscow. At the same time the Russian filter is constraining. We learn little about his repertoire beyond Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff or his career outside the U.S.-U.S.S.R. nexus or his personal life. Of his homosexuality there is only the barest mention, even though it must have been difficult for him in his early years as a good, church-going boy, as well as later when he was being watched closely by both the FBI and the KGB. While much more than a fanbook, Moscow Nights is less than a full biography. And the non-fanatic might wish the editors had rejected some of the anecdotes that did not really make a point.

Although he lived for 55 years after the Moscow triumph, Van Cliburn’s fate was forever wedded to his one greatest moment. His later career, almost to the end of his life, seems to have consisted in being trotted out to perform for every black-tie event held for Russian leaders. 

Review -- The Noise of Time: A Novel by Julian Barnes

After decades of bans, smears, and threats by Stalin and his stooges, in 1949 Dmitri Shostakovich, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union—temporarily and under supervision, of course—to attend a peace conference in New York. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was promising a more open and tolerant regime. Under Stalin Shostakovich had endured many public degradations and might look forward to a little relief; but now the Americans were about to take their turn and serve him the worst humiliation of his life. At the news conference a journalist working for the CIA was waiting with a list of questions designed to expose the repressive Soviet system. Shostakovich’s dignity would be collateral damage. The questions would force him to deny beliefs that went to the core of who he was, beliefs the whole world knew were dear to him, and to ignominiously spout the official line of the Communist Party.

Did he agree, he was asked, with the condemnation of Western music expounded daily in the Soviet press and by the Soviet government? Yes, said Shostakovich, lying, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Did he support banning from Soviet concert halls the works of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Here the knife dug deeper, because, in Shostakovich’s view, Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Meekly he replied that, yes, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Then came body blows. “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed in your speech today about the music of Stravinsky?” Before he went on stage an apparatchik had handed him a speech to read condemning the works of Stravinsky. Hoping to indicate that he did not believe what he was saying, Shostakovich had read mechanically, as if to say, “See the mask I am wearing!” But now his attempt at irony was removed and everyone saw, even in the age of Khrushchev, the iron hand of Soviet Communism in the arts. “Yes,” he said, “I personally subscribe to such views.” Finally there was the question, “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed about your music and that of other composers by Minister Zhdanov?” Zhdanov had been one of Shostakovich’s chief persecutors for many years, once comparing his music to the sound of a road drill. Poor Shostakovich, the great composer, his integrity in tatters, replied for all the world to hear, “Yes, I personally subscribe to the views expressed by Chairman Zhdanov.”  

Underlying The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich, is the assumption of a standoff between art and power, between the transcendence of music and the ugliness of the real world. The final paragraph expresses it poetically. Shostakovich is drinking vodka with two other men. As they clink their glasses together, the composer observes, “A triad.” ”A sound,” adds Barnes, “that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” It’s a nice flourish, climactic and uplifting, yet out of tune with the rest of the book, perhaps even a little precious. Barnes’s story depicts only the ugliness of Shostakovich’s life, only “the noise of time,” only the relentless depredations of the brutal tyranny. Endlessly kicked and spat upon, the composer endlessly cowers and complies. Even when the harsh Stalinist years are over, he submits, sacrificing one of his last remaining principles by joining what he called the “party that kills.” And he suffers the indignity of seeing articles published under his name without being consulted. What could have sustained him through all this misery? Barnes has little to say. Personal happiness is mentioned once, in connection with his third wife, whom he married at age 56. Some believe that she, age 27, was a perq for him arranged by the KGB.

The Noise of Time presents the unedifying spectacle of an artist with his neck firmly under the jackboot of a tyrant, not bravely resisting, not negotiating, not manoeuvring for space, but forever meek and fearful, suffering everything in silence. A last-minute tribute to the glory of art in the clinking of three glasses is a featherweight when balanced against the rest of the book.