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.