Nigel Cliff is a historian, biographer, and translator. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots, was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and was chosen as one of the Washington Post’s best books of the year. His second book, The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama, was a New York Times Notable Book. His most recent book is a translation and edition of The Travels by Marco Polo. A former film and theater critic for the London Times and contributor to The Economist, he writes for a range of publications, including the New York Times Book Review. A Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, he lives in London.

BIOGRAPHY

Nigel Cliff

Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story – How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War

Harper

Hardcover, 978-0-0623-3316-2, 464 pages, $28.99 (also available as paperback and ebook)

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Picture 100,000 people jammed onto sidewalks cheering as a ticker-tape parade surged through New York City.

This time, it wasn’t an astronaut, conquering general, or world-champion athlete riding high in the back of a Lincoln Continental convertible. It was Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn, a twenty-three-year-old concert pianist from Kilgore, Texas.

America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union was at its height. Yet Van Cliburn was being celebrated because had just returned from Moscow. He had stunned the world by winning the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition.

Soviet leaders had conceived the 1958 event to trumpet the “superiority” of USSR cultural achievements. Yet Cliburn’s keyboard performances had enthralled his Russian audiences. The ovations he received were so long and strong that Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev was convinced to give the prize to Cliburn, rather than the Soviet pianist secretly picked in advance to “win.”

“In the summer of 1958,” writes Nigel Cliff in his captivating, well-researched biography Moscow Nights, “Van Cliburn was not only the most famous musician in America. He was just about the most famous person in America – and barring the president, quite possibly the most famous American in the world.”

Cliff’s recent book, his fourth, tracks how a child musical prodigy born in Shreveport, Louisiana, rose to international stardom. It also deals, deftly and engrossingly, with the dangerous political atmosphere inside the Soviet Union in the years leading up to Cliburn’s stunning victory. And it explores his life afterward, in New York and Fort Worth, and his continued involvements in concerts and recordings, plus international cultural diplomacy.

Van Cliburn’s fame came with a price, the author emphasizes. “As Van’s victory became a lead story on every global outlet, many eyes turned to watch his next step,” writes Cliff. “At the State Department, Secretary Dulles ordered officers to report on the young pianist’s personality, attitude, and reliability. In the Kremlin, the Central Committee began a detailed investigation of his case. The KGB opened a file on him, and so did the FBI.” Journalists tracked him, and fans called from everywhere.

In 1960, soon after an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, Van Cliburn again played a role in helping ease diplomatic tensions. He returned to Moscow to perform.

“I have a feeling that I have come home,” he told the big crowd that greeted him. “Of course you know I have always loved Russian music, but when I first got to know your country it was as if I got a second Russian soul.”

Over the years that followed before his death in 2013, he made repeated trips to Russia or performed for Russian leaders visiting the U.S. Even during great tensions between Russia and America, he drew rousing applause from Russian audiences. Little known to many Americans, feared leaders such as Stalin, Khrushchev, and others in the Kremlin were connoisseurs of classical composers.

Nigel Cliff’s Moscow Nights is superb, eye-opening reading for anyone who enjoys music, history, and international intrigue.

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