In the spring of 1958, months after Sputnik, the Soviet Union hosted the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow to showcase its cultural superiority. The winner was a 23-year-old from Texas. This episode explores how Van Cliburn got there: born in Shreveport in 1934 and raised in the oil town of Kilgore, he was taught by his mother, Rildia Bee, whose own teacher Arthur Friedheim had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. At Juilliard he studied with Rosina Lhévinne, absorbing the Russian romantic tradition he would later reflect back at Moscow audiences with total authenticity.

We recount the finals, where Cliburn played Tchaikovsky's First and Rachmaninoff's Third and earned an eight-minute standing ovation, and the moment the paralyzed judges asked Nikita Khrushchev for permission to award the prize to an American. Back home he recei ...