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ifty-eight years ago, a little-known 23-year-old concert pianist from Texas flew to Moscow and won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. Within a matter of hours, Van Cliburn had become the most famous classical musician in America. His victory was reported on the front page of the New York Times and the cover of Time. Not only was he fêted with a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Manhattan—he remains to this day the only musician to have received that honor—but he played on The Tonight Show and appeared as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? For much of the two decades that followed, he was the closest thing that American classical music has had to a pop star.

Cliburn’s popular success owed as much to good timing as it did to his talent, for he won the Tchaikovsky Competition at the height of the Cold War. It seemed unimaginable in 1958 that an American musician might prevail in a Soviet competition, much less that the Russian people would be overjoyed by his success. And this was what put him on the front pages: The warmth of his reception in Moscow persuaded many Americans who feared the prospect of nuclear war that there might be hope for peaceful relations with the Soviet Union.

The reasons for Cliburn’s present obscurity are more complex. Unable to cope with the pressures of premature celebrity, he retired from the concert stage in 1978. As a result, younger concertgoers had no notion of how remarkable an artist he had been in his prime, and because they grew up in a different age, they were no more able to appreciate his half-forgotten career as an unofficial cultural diplomat during a sustained ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nigel Cliff’s Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War endeavors to introduce him to a new generation of listeners.¹ A chatty account of his life and career, the book is devoted in large part to Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky Competition victory and his subsequent Russian tours. A British journalist and popular historian, Cliff appears to know relatively little about music (and not much more about the American classical-music scene in the 1950s) and papers over the sad story of his subject’s artistic decline. Still, he has done his homework, delving into previously untapped primary sources. The result is a book that is, despite its limitations, essential reading for anyone interested in Cliburn—or in the cultural history of the Cold War.

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orn in 1934, Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. (always called “Van”) was the only child of an oil-company purchasing agent and a small-town piano teacher who had studied in her youth with the Russian pianist Arthur Friedheim, a pupil of Franz Liszt. He began playing at the age of three, and his mother was his only teacher until he moved from Texas to New York in 1951 to study at Juilliard. As a result, he was provincial (and engagingly so) both as an artist and as a personality. Gangly and baby-faced, he spoke with a thick southern accent, went to church every Sunday, and opened his recitals by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The reaction of one New Yorker on seeing him perform in the mid-’50s was characteristic: “How odd to see a cowboy play the piano!” Yet he was already an accomplished performer, albeit one of an unusual kind for an artist of his age, an old-fashioned romantic with a passion for the music of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.

Cliburn’s talent was recognized early on when he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition in 1954. The panel of judges included Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Serkin, and George Szell, all of whom believed him to be a world-class talent in the making. But the concert scene was overcrowded with promising young pianists in the mid-’50s, and by 1958 Cliburn was desperate to jump-start his sputtering career. To that end, he entered the first Tchaikovsky Competition, even though it was assumed that the Soviet government would prevent any foreign pianist from winning the first prize.

Indeed, the fix was in, for a Russian pianist had already been tapped by the Ministry of Culture to come out on top. But Cliburn’s outgoing manner charmed the Russian people, who were closely following the competition on TV. And his playing dazzled the panel of judges, two of whom, Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, were themselves among the outstanding pianists of the 20th century. After consulting with Nikita Khrushchev, the jury declared him the winner. The editors of the New York Times immediately recognized the wider implications of their surprise decision and treated it as a major news story. Time followed suit with a cover story called “The All-American Virtuoso” that described Cliburn as “the object of the most explosive single outpouring of popular acclaim ever accorded a U.S. musician,” quoting an unnamed friend who claimed that he had the potential to become “Horowitz, Liberace, and [Elvis] Presley all rolled into one.”

Underlying the public’s extravagant response to Cliburn was the fact that he won the Tchaikovsky Competition six months after the launch of Sputnik 1, which had shocked Americans who took for granted their country’s superiority to the Soviet Union. In addition, American music lovers were no less delighted than their Russian counterparts by Cliburn’s un-self-conscious romanticism and gregarious personality, and they flocked to buy his records. His first album, a performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, jostled for space atop Billboard’s chart of bestselling LPs with Elvis Presley’s King Creole and the original-cast album of My Fair Lady, eventually becoming the first classical album to sell more than a million copies.

Music critics initially shared in the general welter of enthusiasm for Cliburn, but most of them later decided that his playing, notwithstanding its surface appeal, was immature and lacking in intellectual rigor. The real problem, however, was not that Cliburn’s artistry was defective but that it was not quite to the taste of the time. His tone was rich and enveloping, his rubato expansive but tasteful, his technique immaculate. But his direct, unmannered playing was largely devoid of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the Russian virtuosos who, like Josef Hofmann and Sergei Rachmaninoff, had been active in the first half of the 20th century. This led certain critics to conclude, wrongly, that Cliburn lacked true individuality. In addition, he typically steered clear of pre-romantic and modern music in concert, sticking to the familiar pieces that he had learned as a student. He usually played either the Tchaikovsky First or Rachmaninoff Third Concertos with orchestras, and his recital programs consisted in the main of a smallish assortment of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Debussy.

Musicians knew better than to confuse Cliburn’s ultra-conservative repertoire with the quality of his musicianship: Richter had praised him as a “genius,” and such distinguished conductors as Fritz Reiner and Bruno Walter esteemed his artistry. But the critics were increasingly inclined to turn up their noses at a Texan who preferred Rachmaninoff to Bach and Bartók, and their snobbishness—for that was mostly what it was—ate away at his self-confidence.

Cliburn was also viewed with suspicion by both the State Department and the FBI, so much so that J. Edgar Hoover opened a file on Cliburn after he won the Tchaikovsky Competition. While he made no blatantly foolish remarks about U.S.–Soviet relations during his stay in Moscow, the Eisenhower administration nonetheless regarded him as dangerously naive, and his public statements did little to dispel that impression: “The only thing that the Russians want from the Americans,” Cliburn said, “is to meet them in an atmosphere of friendship, sincerity and mutual understanding.” Nor was Cliburn’s political naiveté the only reason government officials looked askance at him. “You can’t love music enough to want to play it without other kids thinking you’re queer or something,” he told a reporter. In fact, he was a deeply closeted homosexual—Hoover himself would later disclose this fact to Lyndon Johnson—and so was treated as a potential security risk.²

In the Soviet Union, to which Cliburn returned several times in the years prior to his retirement, he was adored without reserve. Moreover, his popularity in America was not affected by his hostile reviews, and he was still capable of performing with undiminished power and beauty into the 1970s. But excessive touring had exhausted him, and the strain of maintaining a façade of “all-American” normality undoubtedly took a further toll on his psyche. He started drinking to excess, which caused his playing to become inconsistent.

Cliburn was by then a rich man, and at some point in the mid-’70s he decided to give up performing once he had fulfilled his existing engagements. That took place in 1978, after which he happily returned to Texas and put the grueling life of a concert pianist behind him. Though he made a few more public appearances prior to his death in 2013, his career was for all intents and purpose over.

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ow will posterity judge Van Cliburn?

Nigel Cliff overstates the enduring significance of Cliburn’s work as a cultural emissary. Though it is certainly true that he was one of the first Americans to make a strongly positive impression on the Russian people, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were already moving toward closer cultural ties when he won the Tchaikovsky Competition (the Soviet musicians Emil Gilels and David Oistrakh, for instance, had made their New York debuts three years earlier). While his favorable reception sped up the process, it was hard-headed Realpolitik, not warm-hearted idealism, that finally brought the two countries together.

Cliburn’s artistic career was a different story. To be sure, Time warned as early as 1958 that “in the easy flush of success [he] might be tempted to keep on repeating himself in the showy, romantic repertory he handles so well, neglecting his powers to develop.” So he did, and his unwillingness to expand his repertoire made it impossible for him to grow as an artist. At the age of 23, he could already play Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto as well as it has ever been played, and a time soon came when he no longer had anything new to say about it, or any of the other pieces that he played over and over again. Fortunately, his recordings of those same pieces, all of which remain available, provide incontestable evidence of his youthful stature. It is impossible to hear Cliburn play such major works as Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata, Chopin’s F Minor Fantasie, and (let it be said) the Tchaikovsky First and Rachmaninoff Third Concertos without recognizing that he was a musician of the very first rank.

One inevitably wishes that he had been a different kind of musician, more curious and adventurous. Had he been so, he would almost certainly have been able to sustain his career into middle age and beyond. His electrifying recordings of the Barber Sonata and Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata, two modern pieces that he rarely played in public, testify to a potential for growth that he chose not to explore—to his cost. But we must take artists as they are or not at all, and Van Cliburn, for all his weaknesses, was a great one, a fact that his ultimate failure to live up to his potential cannot efface.