Read Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War for Free Online

1950s, the steely tones and coiled rhythms of modern music were all the rage. Germanic composers were also firmly back in favor: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were the undisputed masters. As for Russian music and the whole Romantic repertoire, with its cult of the inspired virtuoso (including the Hungarian Liszt and the Polish Chopin), it was suddenly as out of fashion as powdered wigs and pistols at dawn. To a mop-haired seventeen-year-old who arrived in New York in the fall of 1951, this came as an awful shock.

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    Room 412
    A TALL pile of loud clothes was flapping along the hallway of the Juilliard School toward the elevator where the legendary Rosina Lhévinne was standing. Barely inhabiting the colorful threads was a rawboned creature with enormous waving hands, a snub nose, and a frizz of gingery blond curls that bounced nearly up to the ceiling. The kid was six foot four, maybe six foot seven with the hair. Rosina, who stood five foot two, craned her neck to find a spotty, boyish face beaming down at her with intent.
    “Honey,” Van Cliburn announced, “ah’ve come to study with y’all.”
    Joe, the school’s Irish elevator operator, might well have spluttered, for this was not the way to address New York’s most revered piano teacher. At seventy-one, the Russian-born Madame Lhévinne was loved and feared in equal measure. One observer suggested she combined the autocracy ofCatherine the Great with the coarseness of a droshky driver. If you could get through your pieces in room 412 at Juilliard, it was said, you could play anywhere in the world.
    Rosina scanned the speaker’s face. She had not seen him before, but the voice was familiar: a honey-and-mesquite drawl that was at once grave and impish.He had telephoned her the other day from the Buckingham Hotel, where he was staying with his mother.During three summers, the pair had traveled up from Texas and enrolled Van in school in order to find the right teacher, and Rildia Bee had thenwritten the school with their final choice: Rosina Lhévinne. Now they had received the school registration card only to find Van had been assigned to another teacher’s class. They felt hurt, bewildered, and betrayed.
    Rosina explained that her classes, which were always oversubscribed, were unfortunately full. She had not heard Van play at the auditions, and he would have to make do with one of her assistants. “Perhaps,” she had offered over the telephone, “I can take you next year.”
    “But I must study with you, Mrs. Lhévinne,” the voice had come back, its unrushed tones curling round every word. “Even if you can give me only ten minutes a week, I’ll consider myself your pupil. However”—and here the voice lingered with a warning edge—“if you definitely can’t take me and I go to another teacher, I’ll stay with that teacher until I graduate. What I want you to know about me, Mrs. Lhévinne, is that I’m very loyal.”
    “Shhh,” Rildia Bee had whispered from the other room of the little suite. As usual, Harvey had stayed back home in Texas.
    “No, Mother,” Van had said firmly when he put the phone down. “She’s a very nice lady, but I want her to know—when I begin, I stay and I end.”
    As luck would have it, Rosina already had two students from Texas. Jeaneane Dowis, a pretty, preppy, quick-witted brunette from Grapevine, was eighteen but had been at Juilliard for two years already. Her friend James Mathis, from Dallas, also eighteen, had just joined the Lhévinne class. Together they put in a word for Van: at the very least, they said, Madame should hear him play.

    JUILLIARD OCCUPIED a sandwich of limestone buildings at West 122nd Street, between Claremont Avenue and Broadway, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. One slice was the handsome Edwardian mansion of the old Institute of Musical Arts; the other, in streamlined Art Deco by the Empire State Building architects, was added when the institute