Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff
Authors: Nigel Cliff
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long-stemmed roses, and someone had stuck them in an eleventh-century Song dynasty vase. It started leaking over the piano, first a trickle, then a flood. Rosalie was beginning to crack up when Van breezed in, sat at the piano, fixed his soft eyes on his patroness, and played the Schumann-Liszt “Widmung.” “Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,” he sang along, swaying into the music: “You are my soul, you are my heart.”
The next morning, the reviews of Van’s Carnegie Hall performance were good but not effusive. One exception was Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram and Sun :“This is one of the most genuine and refreshing keyboard talents to come out of the West—or anywhere else—in a long time,” he wrote. “Van Cliburn is obviously going places, except that he plays as if he had already been there.”
AFTER DRAWING a blank from Sol Hurok, Van finally signed with CAMI, and in January 1955 its Midwest representative Schuyler Chapin, who was married to Betty Steinway of the piano-manufacturing clan, wangled him a rare appearance on NBC’s Tonight , starring Steve Allen. “Longhair” music was usually considered the kiss of death for a talk show, and Van didn’t even have a name, but he played Ravel’s Toccata and a Chopin étude, and caused a minor sensation. Viewers sent in letters and telegrams and jammedthe switchboard. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees’ club called for a booking. Across the Midwest, Chapin was asked about“that extraordinary guy with the hair we saw on TV.” Suddenly the concerts mounted up: that season, Van played twenty orchestral dates and ten recitals, the latter running through Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Medtner, Mozart, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Scarlatti, Schumann, and Stravinsky. When the Cleveland Summer Orchestra asked him to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, he learned it in two weeks. Audiences reacted so intensely that Van stood overwhelmed amid thundering applause, shaking hands over and over with the conductor and concertmaster, begging the orchestra to share the bows. Critics raved about the young musical Adonis with the flashing fingers and the unquenchable fire, likening his impact to that ofFranz Liszt bursting on the Paris music world, also age twenty.“Tear out this name, write it somewhere, get to know it: Van Cliburn,” urged a Denver paper, declaring him “the most important young pianist of his generation.”
This was sensational, though frequent mentions of cowboys and rodeos made it plain that the fascination stemmed in part from finding such talent in such an unusual person from such an unusual place. Meanwhile, Van’s impact on the Tonight show had been great enough that its host, Steve Allen, wanted him back. He was featured again that April, but this time he followed a slapstick act, played an obscure piece by Medtner followed by a long, reflective work by Chopin, and died. Novelty in the American entertainment world had a nasty habit of wearing off fast.
THE SAME month that Van was competing for the Leventritt, the United States detonated its first viable thermonuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. By using nuclear fission, the mechanism of the atom bomb, to set off a secondary fusion reaction, scientists exponentially increased its destructive power. At fifteen megatons (the equivalent of 750 Hiroshima bombs) the “Castle Bravo” test produced a yield that was twice what was expected. Strong windsblew the radioactive fallout far across the Pacific Ocean, killing a Japanese tuna fisherman ninety miles away and contaminating the catch. If a single thermonuclear blast could have global ecological consequences, the world darkly brooded, what would be the effect of many? Experts provided the answer: just a hundred H-bombs could“create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”
Nine months later, tuna was still being condemned by the ton; the following
The next morning, the reviews of Van’s Carnegie Hall performance were good but not effusive. One exception was Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram and Sun :“This is one of the most genuine and refreshing keyboard talents to come out of the West—or anywhere else—in a long time,” he wrote. “Van Cliburn is obviously going places, except that he plays as if he had already been there.”
AFTER DRAWING a blank from Sol Hurok, Van finally signed with CAMI, and in January 1955 its Midwest representative Schuyler Chapin, who was married to Betty Steinway of the piano-manufacturing clan, wangled him a rare appearance on NBC’s Tonight , starring Steve Allen. “Longhair” music was usually considered the kiss of death for a talk show, and Van didn’t even have a name, but he played Ravel’s Toccata and a Chopin étude, and caused a minor sensation. Viewers sent in letters and telegrams and jammedthe switchboard. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees’ club called for a booking. Across the Midwest, Chapin was asked about“that extraordinary guy with the hair we saw on TV.” Suddenly the concerts mounted up: that season, Van played twenty orchestral dates and ten recitals, the latter running through Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Medtner, Mozart, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Scarlatti, Schumann, and Stravinsky. When the Cleveland Summer Orchestra asked him to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, he learned it in two weeks. Audiences reacted so intensely that Van stood overwhelmed amid thundering applause, shaking hands over and over with the conductor and concertmaster, begging the orchestra to share the bows. Critics raved about the young musical Adonis with the flashing fingers and the unquenchable fire, likening his impact to that ofFranz Liszt bursting on the Paris music world, also age twenty.“Tear out this name, write it somewhere, get to know it: Van Cliburn,” urged a Denver paper, declaring him “the most important young pianist of his generation.”
This was sensational, though frequent mentions of cowboys and rodeos made it plain that the fascination stemmed in part from finding such talent in such an unusual person from such an unusual place. Meanwhile, Van’s impact on the Tonight show had been great enough that its host, Steve Allen, wanted him back. He was featured again that April, but this time he followed a slapstick act, played an obscure piece by Medtner followed by a long, reflective work by Chopin, and died. Novelty in the American entertainment world had a nasty habit of wearing off fast.
THE SAME month that Van was competing for the Leventritt, the United States detonated its first viable thermonuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. By using nuclear fission, the mechanism of the atom bomb, to set off a secondary fusion reaction, scientists exponentially increased its destructive power. At fifteen megatons (the equivalent of 750 Hiroshima bombs) the “Castle Bravo” test produced a yield that was twice what was expected. Strong windsblew the radioactive fallout far across the Pacific Ocean, killing a Japanese tuna fisherman ninety miles away and contaminating the catch. If a single thermonuclear blast could have global ecological consequences, the world darkly brooded, what would be the effect of many? Experts provided the answer: just a hundred H-bombs could“create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”
Nine months later, tuna was still being condemned by the ton; the following
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