The gangly young American Van Cliburn’s victory in the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958, six months after the first Sputnik went into orbit, was more than just a pianistic event. The innocent Texan (who died last month) suddenly became one of the key players in the cold war – or a cold war anti-warrior, an American emissary in a counter-war of peace and culture. While nuclear submarines and missiles squared up to each other across the Bering Strait, Van Cliburn’s sensitive fingers became one of the prime instruments of American soft power, matching or even outdoing the Soviets at what they thought they did best.
He became, in other words, part of a diplomatic great game which was bound, in the end, to swallow and swamp his pianistic gifts. The game was played with considerable skill by both American and Soviet political machines. When the jury at the Tchaikovsky in 1958 wanted to award Cliburn the first prize, it felt it had to ask permission from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “If he is the best, give it to him,” Khrushchev is reported to have replied. He was either being scrupulously honest and open, or playing a blinder by seeing that the USSR would gain by granting the prize to an American – showing its lofty impartiality and adherence to artistic standards, and keeping the Tchaikovsky as the gold standard of piano competitions.