So much for the Tchaikovsky. Cliburn paused. His hands hovered over the black-striped pianoscape with the same solitary tension which afflicts the pilots of reconnaissance planes when they drone over enemy territory, gathering in the coordinates of railway yards, cathedrals and apartment blocks for the convenience of master bombardiers. A slow, rapturous smile trembled across his face. His hands descended. He began to play the Rachmaninoff. The judges closed their dreamy eyes. The audience wept. An apparatchik rushed to the telephone. Within twenty minutes, militiamen had surrounded the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, holding back the yearning, adoring crowds. What a debacle! In the end, somebody had to call Comrade Khruschev himself. The matter got decided in the American’s favor then, I believe because a calculated magnanimity appeared to be the least embarrassing stance. After all, even the jurors were applauding! The bravos lasted eight minutes. Cliburn was embraced by E. Gilels and K. P. Kondrashin…—It was the eleventh of April—the selfsame day when, in contradistinction to the American warmongers, we withdrew our last forty-one thousand troops from East Germany. Not long after midnight the sixteen jurors reached agreement (which is to say, they were informed of the decision of Comrade Khruschev). On the thirteenth, a loudspeaker said: Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Junior. The crowd screamed: Vanyitchka, Vanyitchka!
Oh, dear, oh, dear, said Shostakovich. He was quite surprised, because the paragraph they’d prepared for publication over his signature rhapsodized about “this latest Soviet victory.” Already it had come out that Cliburn’s father was the hireling of an oil company, and that the son’s travel allowance had been provided by a front organization of the international capitalist Rockefeller.
Mitya, please relax, said Oborin. That’s not your problem. They’ll get you to sign something else. At least he played Russian music…
You’re correct! the composer replied, much relieved. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear…
He trusted Oborin because he knew him. They’d been evacuated together from the siege of Leningrad, on that long, long train ride which they could never forget, having been accompanied every now and then by the vibrato of the Fascist bombers.
Moreover, continued Oborin, it wasn’t just the Cliburn kid who played well. The Radio Symphony members truly surpassed themselves…
Lev, what did you really think? To be honest, I wasn’t exactly, how should I say, listening to the Rachmaninoff, because my son—
Well, I’d have to say the Tchaikovsky concerto was superb to the extent that that’s possible with Tchaikovsky, although most of the judges preferred the Rachmaninoff, which I found really cloying. Maybe he laid on the rubato a bit thick… no, I’m just jealous. The kid’s a master.
You don’t say! murmured Shostakovich, twiddling his fingers. Who would have thought it? Well, well, well. An American boy from Kilgore, Texas. Can you imagine?
On the eighteenth Van Cliburn gave his first public recital as a winner. (Meanwhile, the United States Navy fired a dummy Polaris warhead from underwater.) Raising his hands and gazing dreamily down at his outstretched fingers as if he’d never seen them before, he repeated the Tchaikovsky concerto, which the New York Times, still using the language of war, described as a big, percussive attack that dominated the orchestra. While it’s true that he peppered the first movement with powerfully booming chords whose metronome-like steadiness overwhelmed the romantic warmth of the strings, he was no war machine. His loudest hammer-blows remained somehow bell-like, controlled. Moreover, that opening thunder soon gave way to crystalline arpeggios, each note of which glittered as distinctly as an ice-crystal. Whenever the score permitted, Cliburn showed a still gentler touch, lingering a little, deviating from the first stern sweetness, confident enough to give the orchestra a place in the sun, sometimes following, sometimes leading, like a dancer showing good manners to his partner. Oh, he was always clear; his every note was glass. They applauded in a frenzy. Then he repeated the Rachmaninoff.—Another ovation! For an encore he played his own composition, “Nostalgia.”
And so the time came when Shostakovich had to meet him, at the congratulatory dinner. Come to think of it, he’d already met him twice, first at the opening ceremonies and then when the prize was presented, for, as I may have neglected to tell you, Shostakovich was the Chairman of the Organizing Committee for this First International Tchaikovsky Competition (an appointed position, whose bestowal underlined the Party’s confident expectation that his rehabilitation would never be a source of regret), and so it was actually he who’d been required to stand at the podium, praising Van Cliburn, and he who’d transmitted the medal and the envelope of cash into the boy’s sweaty hand while newsmen’s flashbulbs exploded like antiaircraft rounds. Truth to tell, he was less interested in Cliburn than in the pretty violinist from Volgograd who sat across the table. Something about her lips—well, she wasn’t really that young, but Shostakovich had begun to find that every woman now appeared in his eyes a virgin, plus or minus. He couldn’t believe how girlish the forty-year-olds had started to look. Yesterday he’d been chatting with E. V. Denisov about what made up a real Russian girl’s face: a pleasing prominence of the cheekbones, in youth anyway (or was that just because until just recently Russian children had never gotten enough to eat?); Denisov, less enthralled by this subject, because more concerned about the Central Committee’s new Decree on the Correction of Errors, yawned, opened and closed both pianos, ate a herring and directed their mutual consideration to the poor complexions of many Russian females, but Shostakovich counterattacked by praising those wheat fields of hair blonde or auburn or black, not to mention the dark eyebrows which went so well with pale hands (not very proletarian! laughed Denisov).