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

merged with theschool founded, after much skullduggery, with the fortune of textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard. Six hundred artistic souls crammed into a tangle of pastel green corridors and stairways and halls, each confidently expecting a dazzling solo career and almost all destined to be brutally disappointed. Pianists, numbering two hundred or so, were the dominant tribe; there were also violinists, cellists, wind and brass players, percussionists, singers, composers, conductors, and, this year, dancers, whom the musicians noticed chiefly on account of their odor. Like monks in a cell, the musical novices shut themselves in rehearsal studios for ten hours a day, banding together to keep rivals away and scaring off freshmen with tall tales of razor blades planted between piano keys. Social life was intense but strained. United by a cultish devotion to the school and their art, students were jealously divided by the pressure to outplay one another to obtain a hearing. Some crumpled under the competition; others basked in a glow of conscious exclusivity, buoyed with the pleasant sensation of filling their space well.
    As for the faculty, they were the students a few decades on. Teachers’ reputations depended on their attracting talented pupils, and they competed shamelessly for the best. Once they had them, they hated seeing them play for colleagues or talk to members of another class. Hierarchy was engraved in brass on the doors of their studios, recording how long they had survived. Rosina Lhévinne’s nameplate bore the year 1924, when she and her husband, Josef, joined the faculty. Both had graduated withgold medals from the Moscow Conservatory in the 1890s, but after being trapped in Germany by the First World War and losing their savings in the Russian Revolution, they had sailed for America, where Josef made a sensational debut at Carnegie Hall and they taught in tandem, she bearing the brunt of the work while he was away performing and philandering. When Josef passed away in 1944, a year after his classmate and friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rosina became America’s foremost link to the golden age of Russian Romanticism. At seventy-one, she was Juilliard’s undisputed star teacher.
    More perhaps than any other young American, Van revered that tradition, with its virtuosos who painted stories from the keyboard with a religious passion. To his mind, Romantic Russian music was so exquisitely, painfully beautiful that he knew it could only be the breath of God. Aside from Rildia Bee, he could not imagine studying with anyone else but Rosina, which was why he was here in the famous fourth-floor studio with its double walls and cork floor, ready to play his way into her hard-won affections.
    Rosina sat in her high-backed green-upholstered chair as Van raised his huge, bony hands. They were as big as Josef’s, she noticed, big enough to play a twelfth and stretch thirteen notes, middle C to A, with long, tapered fingers that could get between the keys. But what were they doing? His left hand was drumming the opening fanfare of Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, a storm-racked chandelier of crashing chords that serious pianists were supposed to spurn. A deep, ominous tremolando, the same fanfare with the right hand, and another tremulous roll. Then the lightest chords, tripping off the fingers of his right hand while his left played the wistful melody. Both hands away, flying along the keyboard like a ballerina’s feet barely brushing the floor. A moment of tranquillity, his head back now, eyes closed, forehead creased at the exquisite beauty of the thing, his soul swelling with every note. Long before then, Rosina had her answer. The unusual boy was not only playing with startling control and power, but he was also constructing something uncommonly noble, sensitive, and heartfelt. More than that, he had a big, sweeping approach that she had not seen in years: a grand style that uncannily echoed the dashing